December Issue 2022

INTERVIEW - NEO4J (P-38)

TIME TO BID GOODBYE 2022 AND LOOK FORWARD TO THE NEW YEAR

Hello Friends.

This is time to say goodbye to 2022 and do review of the past year. When I am writing this piece of editorial, I see the pandemic is not at all over from the earth. The factory of the world - China is still in the grips of the Covid-19 and the supply chain is still not in order. The entire world is moving towards recession. Also, there are negative feedbacks about global industrial growth. No country is touching 5 - 6 % of GDP growth except India. Job cut is in the greatest market that is USA. There is uncertainty in the global market due to the war between Russia and Ukraine. Countries are happy supporting and investing in war machines for the country of their choice than supporting to eradicate pandemic from the face of the earth and work more towards sustainability and global warming. However, from a macro-observation point of view, IT has been biggest gainer this year, cloud and container technologies have been at the forefront. Organizations have invested heavily on the digital technologies. Event companies have started creating

their own metaverse. Many companies have adopted blockchain too. We saw many sectors adopted robotics and drone technologies too. However, cyber security has been the biggest gainer segment. Many of the big-ticket incidents including attack on CK Birla group and hacking of AIIMs has been the largest ones. This year also saw the biggest data breach in the banking sector. Even large tech companies have been attached by the cyber criminals. So, the year saw the growth in the cyber security adoption by the CIOs and CISOs. The board room and the management got themselves involved into the discussion of how to keep their organizations safe from the hands of the cyber criminals. Besides, colocations gained huge momentum. 90 % the companies saw embracing chatbots of some sorts. Either they integrated into their websites or created WhatsApp and message based. At the same time, processes and manufacturing industries also added a huge RPA based strategy. What we could not see much happening in the AR VR based use cases which should have happened more. So also, 3D printing could not take off as expected by the industry.

AI and big data also saw good takers in the industry. CIOs chose AI based strategy to support other organizations with the business. For example, they created AI based strategy for the marketing and sales organizations. We are happy that industry adopted an agile and nimble strategy for a better growth. Happy Year End to All.

The

SANJAY MOHAPATRA SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

SUPPLEMENT QUOTES FROM TOP CIOS

The supplement story of the magazine would have relevant quotes from the top CIOs in India.

PLUS Interviews and Case Studies

Catch interviews, guest articles and case studies of recent applications from the Industry stakeholders, IT/ITES Vendors and IT leaders and CIOs from the Enterprise IT World CIO Community.

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DATA BRIEF

Fortinet announced a business benefit analysis of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN and its ability to support large enterprises by delivering 300% ROI over three years and payback in eight months.

As one of the top SD-WAN vendors, Fortinet commissioned a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study by Forrester Consulting to analyze the value that Fortinet Secure SD-WAN can provide to large enterprises, examining both the network and security impact on customers’ businesses.

As part of the independent study, Forrester interviewed business decision-makers with experience

across industries and geographies, including retail, healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing. Collectively, the organizations deployed Fortinet Secure SD-WAN and other Fortinet products, such as switches, wireless LAN, and wireless WAN, and have more than $1 billion in annual revenue, up to 8,500 sites, and up to 133,000 employees.

Based on customer feedback, Forrester developed a composite model for the study and built out a threeyear financial model to reflect the costs and benefits of the investment.

Global shipments for AR and VR headsets will decline by 12.8% in 2022, dropping to 9.7 million units. Growth is expected to return in 2023 as shipments are forecast to jump 31.5% year over year.

Source: Gartner

NETSCOUT SYSTEMS, announced the successful interoperability of Omnis™ Cyber Intelligence (OCI) with Amazon Security Lake, powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), to deliver advanced network detection and response (NDR) insights. With comprehensive network visibility, contextual cybersecurity investigation, and smart detection, OCI enhances the quality of Amazon Security Lake, so that companies can manage threats across complex hybrid-cloud infrastructures.

NETSCOUT participated in the Amazon Security Lake beta program, in which OCI enriched the security data in the Amazon Security Lake, helping to optimize the smart outcomes of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) algorithms and other subscriber applications. Leveraging Omnis CyberStream’s scalable deep packet inspection (DPI) and patented Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) technology, OCI delivers better insights and predictions to enhance an

enterprise’s security posture.

Amazon Security Lake is built in the customer’s account. The data lake is backed by an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket and organizes data as a set of AWS Lake Formation tables. Amazon Security Lake, enriched with OCI findings, becomes a source of valuable cybersecurity insights to understand what is occurring across an enterprise’s entire hybrid cloud information technology (IT) environment, including cyberthreats and attack surface changes.

Paul Barrett, CTO for enterprise, NETSCOUT, said, “Hybrid cloud infrastructure has become increasingly complex with multiple edges making it prone to increased cyberattacks,” “Exporting OCI findings, derived from deep packet inspection, into Amazon Security Lake gives customers added security and performance across multiple accounts, clouds, or on-premises networks.

Tenable®, announced the results of a telemetry study examining the scope and impact of the critical Log4j vulnerability, known as Log4Shell, in the months following its initial disclosure. According to the data collected from over 500 million tests, 72% of organizations remain vulnerable to the Log4Shell vulnerability as of October 1, 2022. The data highlights legacy vulnerability remediation challenges, which are the root cause of the majority of data breaches.

When Log4Shell was discovered in December 2021, organizations around the world scrambled to determine their risk. In the weeks following its disclosure, organizations significantly reallocated resources and invested tens of thousands of hours to identification and remediation efforts. One federal cabinet department reported that its security team devoted 33,000 hours to Log4j vulnerability response alone.

BY: DWTC, DUBAI

PLACE: EMIRATES TOWERS, DUBAI

BY: ENTERPRISE IT WORLD MEA

SentinelOne Announces Support for Amazon Security Lake to Power Cloud Investigations

S/HE SAID IT

SentinelOne announced SentinelOne Singularity Cloud works with Amazon Security Lake from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support hunting, threat investigations, and forensics on cloud logs within the SentinelOne Singularity XDR Platform. Amazon Security Lake is a new service that automatically centralizes an organization’s security data from cloud, on-premises, and custom sources into a customer owned, purpose-built data lake. Both Singularity Cloud and Amazon Security Lake use the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) to simplify how logs are ingested, searched, and analyzed. As a result, customers can begin investigations without any effort to parse or normalize security logs.

SentinelOne’s Singularity Cloud consists of a Cloud Workload Security (CWS) solution that offers near real-time threat detection and prevention for containers, Kubernetes clusters, and virtual machines. Singularity

Cloud protects against cloud threats such as ransomware, cryptomining, and fileless attacks in near real-time using patented behavioral artificial intelligence (AI) and threat intelligence. The platform’s XDR data plane, called Skylight™, enables customers to ingest third-party data sources, such as those from Amazon Security Lake, to support a diverse set of use cases. Threat hunting, investigation, and forensics use cases are easier and more complete with Singularity Cloud’s detailed, natively-collected container and virtual machine (VM) telemetry. The initial data ingested into Skylight from Amazon Security Lake includes Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) flow logs, AWS CloudTrail management events, Amazon Route 53 Resolver query logs, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) data events, AWS Lambda function execution activity, and AWS Security Hub findings.

ON

Data of 600 thousand Indians for sale on bot markets

“This growing threat has already affected five million people globally, with hackers selling webcam snaps, screenshots, up-to-date logins, cookies, and digital fingerprints At least five million people have had their online identities stolen and sold on bot markets for 490 INR on average. Out of all the affected people, 600 thousand are from India, making the country the most affected by this threat in the world. This data comes from research by the cybersecurity company NordVPN, which looked into three major bot markets. The word “bot” in this situation does not mean an autonomous program – in this case, it refers to data-harvesting malware.”

VARUN BABBAR, MD (INDIA & SAARC), QLIK

QUICK BYTE

“Small and medium-sized businesses are a big priority for Cisco, especially in Asia Pacific, which is one of the fastest growing markets for SMBs.”

SECURITY

MICHIKO KAMATA MANAGING DIRECTOR, SMB APJC AT CISCO

“Automation, when used naively and combined with nonvalidated data, can have the pernicious effect of weakening human vigilance.”

NETGEAR, a global networking solutions provider exhibits its wide product portfolio at IFSEC India 2022, organized in Pragati Maidan Delhi. The three-day event will observe a gathering of industry veterans, and solution providers with both channel partners and senior decision-makers from the government and private sectors, across the globe.

NETGEAR’s executive team including Annamalai AR, Senior Manager and Abhishek Anand, Senior Sales Manager will be available at the stall to discuss in detail with the visitors NETGEAR’s top-of-the-line technology incorporated in their products. In line with Security and Surveillance solutions, NETGEAR will be demonstrating its products ranging from Pro Wi-Fi Access Points, ProAV solutions,

PoE Switches, etc at the event.

Speaking about the event Marthesh Nagendra, Country Manager – India, ME & SAARC, NETGEAR said “We are privileged to be a regular participant of IFSEC India that offers solution providers the perfect platform to reach clients. Such events give us a great opportunity to tap into the vast potential presented in the market through thought leadership, product & solution showcases and year-round networking. We are confident that this year also the event will be a great success providing us with a lot of business opportunities owing to our innovative and state-of-art product range.”

As the world continues to adopt technologies such as audio, video and control over Ethernet as their delivery method of choice.

Vertiv has introduce the new Vertiv™ Liebert® APM Plus, a highdensity, modular, and transformer-free uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system that delivers up to 97% efficiency in double conversion mode, and up to 99% efficiency in eco-mode. Available from 50 to 500kW, the Liebert APM Plus is now available in India.

The Liebert APM Plus architecture is designed to optimize energy use and heat dissipation, minimizing the demand and consumption of data center air conditioning systems. The combination of these factors reduces CO2 emissions to a minimum, thus helping data centers to meet environmental compliance standards.

“The Liebert APM Plus design shows our commitment to providing our customers with solutions that address and meet their current demands,” said Arunangshu Chattopadhyay, director of power product marketing and head of central technical support at Vertiv Asia. “With its flexible design and enhanced features, this UPS is sure to address the availability needs of today’s customers. Additionally, the Liebert APM Plus’s small footprint makes it ideal for use in Vertiv™ integrated solutions such as Vertiv™ SmartRow™ and Vertiv™ SmartAisle™, as well as the Vertiv™ Liebert® APTpower distribution system.”

EXECUTIVE MOVEMENT

Veteran Joins Panzura As Chief Information Security

GLOBAL UPDATE

SANDSIV awarded 2022 Product Leader in European VoC Industry by Frost & Sullivan

SANDSIV, wins the Frost & Sullivan 2022 award for leadership in the European VoC industry for sandsiv+, its fully integrated, end-to-end enterprise-grade AI-powered platform. This recognition, based on a recent analysis of the European Voice of the Customer (VoC) solutions market, makes SANDSIV the #1 vendor in Europe for two consecutive years.

Frost & Sullivan’s report analyzed the top 14 industry players in Europe based on product quality, responsiveness to customer needs, growth potential, and financial performance. According to Frost, “SANDSIV’s agility and farsighted vision truly demonstrate its focus on delivering customer value by shifting its technology architecture. The company is well positioned as a product leader in the European market with its cutting-edge deep machine learning and NLP technologies.”

One of SANDSIV’s key competitive differentiators is that it provides an easy-to-use, self-service, no-code solution for the complex VoC industry, enabling customers to maximize product capabili-

ties. By capturing different types of VoC and customer feedback from multiple channels and sources, it can manage complex data streams, perform a range of advanced analytic capabilities, and provide in-depth visualizations of customer interactions to facilitate rapid and informed decision-making.

SANDSIV has invested significantly in the development and integration of its products and solutions’ architecture. Unlike other competitors that offer multi-tenant clouds, the company provides a multi-single-tenant cloud architecture, providing security and personalization while not neglecting scalability and the total cost of ownership.

“The company works hard to position itself as an innovation leader with customer-centricity at heart. Having developed one of the most precise deep learning-powered engines for topic detection and sentiment analysis, the vendor focuses on transformers, a new NLP model generation that allows high translation precision.

About The Book

BY CAROLYN DEWAR

From the world’s most influential management consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, this is an insight-packed, revelatory look at how the best CEOs do their jobs based on extensive interviews with today’s most successful corporate leaders—including chiefs at Netflix, JPMorgan Chase, General Motors, and Sony.

About the Author

Carolyn Dewar is a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company. She has published over thirty articles in the Harvard Business Review and the McKinsey Quarterly and is a frequent keynote speaker.

Scott Keller is a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company.

Cloud Cover to Soften Recession

Concerns

The concern over a recession in 2023 will drive more enterprises to shift data intensive tasks to the cloud to reduce infrastructure and operational costs while also improving cybersecurity. Moving applications to the cloud will also help organizations deliver greater data-driven customer experiences. For example, advanced simulation and test data management capabilities such as real-time feature extraction and encryption will

enable use of a secure cloud-based data mesh that will accelerate and deepen customer insights through new algorithms operating on a richer data set. In the year ahead, expect the cloud to be a surprising boon for companies as they navigate economic uncertainty.

Digital Twin Deployments to Increase Despite Economic Woes

With R&D efficiency a priority in 2023, expect to see increased use of digital twins for system

design and testing. This approach enables faster design cycles, more efficient co-design of hardware and software, a more robust product, and reduced costs while also delivering benefits in improved manufacturability and serviceability. In the coming year, anticipate a shift to connected platforms in which complete products are designed and tested via a digital twin.

Christel House School in Bangalore, more than one hundred schoolchildren from local elementary and secondary schools were given the unique opportunity to share their datadriven ideas for improving education. They included calling on governments to fund more computer labs in schools, dedicated curriculum time to learning about mental health issues and focusing on skills development so that students feel prepared to enter the job market.

The event was hosted by NetApp, a global, cloud-led, data-centric software company, the India STEM Foundation, and World’s Largest Lesson, an education program run by Project Everyone working in partnership with UNICEF.

“Education must be transformed to meet the needs of an ever-changing world,” said Alison Bellwood, Executive Director of World’s Largest Lesson. “Today’s school students have a unique perspective, informed by their COVID-19 experiences and the world they see around them.

DIGEST

AKAMAI CLOUD COMPUTING TO STRENGTHEN LEGAL TECH START-UP ZOLVIT’S CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE

Akamai Technologies, and Zolvit, has collaborating to strengthen Zolvit’s cloud infrastructure. Zolvit will be consolidating its infrastructure into a single cloud provider with the help of Akamai Cloud Computing and its storage capabilities. It was getting difficult for Zolvit to manage their cloud infrastructure across several cloud providers because of the complexity, managing customer experience, as well as the cost and maintenance requirements. This will help them save close to 30% on their IT expenses.

My Own Internet (MOI), a personalized Web3 internet protocol, is focused on driving web3 development and adoption to new heights with their path-breaking IP, Interaction State Machine (ISM), allowing participation at Layer 0.

MOI is a global network that enables sustainable transactions across millions of decentralized nodes and billions of transactions in an interoperable network. With hyper parallelism mechanism, complete user ownership and personalization, cross platform transfers of digital assets, data storage, and web2 to web3 migration processes, this ecosystem is highly efficient for users and developers alike.

A primary offering of Sarva Labs, a deeptech web3 startup focused on simplifying digital interactions through emerging technologies such as blockchain and AI, MOI is forging a path towards a pioneering user-centric consensus mechanism that will give the power back to the users in a simple and effective manner. With a human-centric sybil mechanism, MOI has introduced participant context as a new dimension to computation and settling of transactions in distributed networks. This unique and fresh concept generates personalized value states, truly owned by the users, with a high degree of security and scalability.

Zolvit’s workloads include serving 5,000+ unique customers on a daily basis, managing 60M+ cases for their litigation management SaaS platform – LIBRA, and over 10,000 MSMEs hosted on their integrated accounting and GST platform – Dash.

INDIA’S FIRST EMBEDDED FINANCE COMPANY RUPIFI HAS DISBURSED A TOTAL OF ~2,000 CRORE+ LOANS SINCE ITS INCEPTION

Rupifi, has disbursed ~2,000 crore+ loans since 2020 and has witnessed a growth percent (GOPY) of 407.7% compared to the previous year. The growth in loan disbursal has been attributed to an uptick during the pre-Diwali season.

Rupifi which operates at some of the category-leading B2B marketplaces in India across sectors such as FMCG, pharma, fashion, electronics, agriculture and food, saw maximum presence in the FMCG & Grocery sector with ~75%, followed by consumer goods, agri, and pharma.

While the cyber attack on AIIMS Delhi still remains a concern, a threat actor with a high reputation on a cybercrime forum is advertising sensitive information of another hospital’s patients. This data purportedly belongs to Tamil Nadu-based multispecialty hospital – Sree Saran Medical Center.

CloudSEK’s discovered a post made by a threat actor, advertising sensitive data allegedly sourced from Three Cube IT Lab India.

Three Cube IT Chennai is a provider of application development, business intelligence, and consulting services. A sample was shared as proof for potential buyers to inspect the authenticity of the data. This data was found to be containing patient details from a hospital, based in Tamil Nadu. The

sample image has data records dated from the years 2007-2011.

The data set contains 150K records of patients’ data. The data fields present in the patients’ database include – patient name, guardian name, DOB, doctor’s details, and address information. The data was allegedly sourced from a compromised third-party vendor, Three Cube IT Lab.

As part of responsible disclosure CloudSEK has informed all the stakeholders about the incident.

The sensitive data that was stolen from Three Cube IT Lab has been advertised on popular cybercrime forums and a Telegram channel used to sell databases and which is frequented by threat actors.

The Lending Service Provider (LSP) which is backed by Tiger Global, Bessemer Venture Partners, Quona Capital and Ankur Capital, currently powers more than 150k businesses in 500+ cities and has successfully disbursed over ~2,000 crore loans since 2020.

YOTTA GETS EMPANELLED WITH MEITY AS ACCREDITED CLOUD SERVICE PROVIDER

Yotta Infrastructure announced its empanelment with the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) as an accredited Cloud Service Provider. With this development, Yotta’s extensive portfolio of cloud and cloud-enabled services can now serve the digital transformation needs of government departments, agencies, rural and urban administrative bodies, and public sector organisations.

World’s first Context Aware P2P Protocol, MOI, brings new dynamics to Web3

NetApp Partners with World’s Largest Lesson, Provides Platform for Students to Present Data Based Proposals for Transforming Education

Threat Actor Selling 150K Patients’ Record Of Multispecialty Hospital On Dark Web

F5 expands its global network presence in India

Microsoft announces certification for students to drive employability

two industry certifications upon completion. So far, 28 universities and 1500 low code student developers have participated in the pilot program.

Given how critical technology has become to an organization’s operations, there is a huge demand for employees who can innovate within the business to streamline processes, improve business intelligence, and drive digital transformation. Educating more students in low code tools addresses the developer gap and the growing need for organizations and companies to be able to create business solutions without relying solely on overstretched IT departments.

Microsoft and the Project Management Institute (PMI) are partnering to announce the Power Platform University Hub, an integrated curriculum designed to help educational institutions to prepare students for the workforce and help them attract potential employers through low code skills.

Through learning paths and hands-on labs, students will learn the managerial and technical knowledge needed to build low code business solutions and will receive

Sam Sibley, Global Head of Citizen Developer at PMI, said, “At PMI we are committed to helping equip the next generation of leaders with tools that will enable them to excel in the workforce,” “The entire citizen development movement is a catalyst for faster change and is revolutionizing the way we work, as well as the way we are able to create social impact. Which is why we are excited to work with Microsoft to help enable students across the globe with the skills they need to thrive, both in the workplace and when impacting social change.”

F5 launched the first of several planned points of presence (PoP) sites in India. The initial sites are located in Mumbai and Chennai, at GPX One in Equinix, and Sify (with the backhaul TCP carrier, Tata Communications Ltd.) respectively. These new PoPs extend F5’s rapidly growing PoP infrastructure around the world into India. The F5 global network is one of the world’s most connected, peering networks in the world that offers secure connectivity for distributed applications across multi-cloud, on-prem, and edge environments.

These new sites support F5 Distributed Cloud Services; a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that reduces complexities and enables easy provisioning of application services with no hardware or software installation needed. The SaaS platform provides customers with a single console to manage and secure their applications deployed either in the public cloud, on-premises, or at the edge.

Air India, announced a collaboration with Microsoft aimed at redefining employee experience and accelerating the company’s digital transformation journey. The collaboration seeks to unlock the opportunities that Microsoft’s collaboration and security tools provide to create a comprehensive, agile and empowering employee experience for Air India employees world-wide.

Attracting best-in-class talent is a key transformation pillar of the Vihaan.AI initiative that Air India has embarked upon. Designing a strong employee proposition and providing an intuitive and easy to use digital productivity and collabora-

tion suite for every employee is a key part of this.

Through the collaboration with Microsoft, Air India will have access to the rich set of tools in Microsoft 365, which will empower the company to provide best-in-class security, collaboration, integration, and effective communication capabilities.

“As we set out on the journey of transforming Air India’s technology landscape, at the top of our agenda was deploying a world-class productivity, collaboration, and security suite. The set of technologies that we have now deployed from Microsoft will help us reimagine our employee

experience and make it a very compelling proposition for those who wish to join us in this exciting transformation journey. We plan to develop systems that implement unique airline use cases such as precision time schedule and aircraft turnaround management on top of the deployed Microsoft technologies,” said Air India’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Dr. Satya Ramaswamy.

“We were very impressed with the customerfocus and agility of Microsoft’s teams that helped us accomplish this milestone successfully in a very short timeframe,” Ramaswamy added.

Air India collaborates with Microsoft to transform employee experience

“I believe CIOs are positioned to take charge and lead the way.”

Kevin T. Hart, CEO, Segra and former executive vp, chief product and technology officer for Cox Communications

Global Research and Advisory Firm Names Commvault a Leader in Data Resilience Solutions Suites

Commvault, announced Forrester has positioned the company as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Data Resilience Solutions Suites, Q4 2022.

Commvault has been top ranked in the Current Offering category, achieving the highest scores in the Backup-and-Restore Functionality and Automation and Orchestration criteria, and one of the highest scores in the Business Awareness/LOB Functionality criterion. In addition, Commvault received the highest scores possible in the Product Vision, Planned Enhancements, and Delivery Model criteria within the strategy category.

Key factors that contributed to Commvault’s ranking include its breadth of backup support and attention to enterprise needs, product integration of Metallic rounding out its Intelligent Data Services, and comprehensive ransomware

defense capabilities through Metallic® ThreatWise™.

Commvault differentiated itself with its compelling vision in eight of the 13 different backup-and-restore criteria. Forrester specifically states, “Large enterprises that want to protect traditional infrastructure as well as provide advanced data resilience capabilities for newer technologies should look at Commvault.”

Ranga Rajagopalan, Senior Vice President, Products, Commvault, said, “In today’s hybrid cloud world, data has never been more valuable or more vulnerable, and customers need a proactive data protection strategy to stay safe from bad actors,” “We believe our position as a Leader in the Forrester Wave for Data Resilience Solutions Suite validates the completeness of our current offerings and our vision in future-proofing the data protection strategy for our customers.”

Cisco has launched of Partner Deal Express at the recently concluded Cisco Live Melbourne. The Partner Deal Express is a programmatic and scalable initiative aimed at improving sales efficiency and profitability for partners when they sell to small and medium businesses (SMBs).

The program enables Cisco’s partners to provide faster transactions for SMBs as it provides an upfront discount on a targeted portfolio tailored for SMBs. With this, partners would not need to seek approval on deals that fall under this program.

It also offers the best pricing and promotions to improve customer experience and increases partner profitability through predictable pricing, which makes closing SMB deals/transactions easier and faster. To achieve that, Cisco will regularly review historical pricing and competitive analysis and adjust Fast Track (pricing) to provide the best upfront discount for SMBs.

The Partner Deal Express program portfolio includes four product families tailored to cater to fundamental SMB needs. From these core product families, Cisco partners can construct affordable solutions priced to fit specific customers.

Matrix Comsec Bags CII Industrial Innovation Award 2022

Matrix Comsec has been conferred with the CII Industrial Innovation Award, 2022 at the virtual CII Industrial Innovation Awards ceremony in New Delhi on 3rd December, 2022. CII Industrial Innovation Awards were instituted by CII in 2014 to recognise and celebrate visionary enterprises across industry segments. These premier awards seek to recognise and honour the Indian industry’s brightest stars and to identify the top innovative organisations.

The process for determining the top awards and the list of top innovative companies involved a rigorous evaluation process, presentation and

Grand Jury interaction. The unbiased assessment process measured the innovation culture, innovation management, inputs to innovation and the results of innovation.

On the latest recognition, Ganesh Jivani, CEO of Matrix, said, “It is indeed an honour to win this prestigious award and I thank CII for this recognition. Innovation really has been the DNA of Matrix right from its inception. I thank our technology, design and engineering teams for their dedication to building innovative and world-class products. Matrix offers cutting-edge physical Security and Telecom solutions in more

than 50 countries including many first-world technologically advanced nations.”

“With 250+ R&D engineers and world-class processes and infrastructure, Matrix is committed to innovating and designing cutting-edge high-performance products. This recognition is a validation of Matrix’s innovation and design capabilities and will go a long way in motivating us towards building world-class solutions,” he added.

Cisco launches new SMB program to improve partner sales efficiency and profitability in Asia Pacific

talents can undermine the adoption of emerging, cloud-based technologies. As hybrid multicloud adoption picks up, IT leaders will need to ensure their teams are sufficiently upskilled.

TECHNOLOGY TRENDS THAT WILL DEFINE 2023

BY SANJAY @ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

hybrid multicloud

grow in importance as more services move from on-prem to the cloud and as customers

balance their cloud spending across multiple Cloud Service Providers

India’s technology landscape has exploded over the last decade- to the extent that it is being called a “techade”. With data and cloud-based technology at the pivot of all businesses when it comes to operational excellence, several exciting developments await the industry in 2023.

Delivering a Better Hybrid Multicloud Experience for Enterprises

The hybrid multicloud will grow in importance as more services move from on-prem to the cloud and as customers seek to balance their cloud spending across multiple Cloud Service Providers. Public cloud spending in India is expected to grow 27% YoY in 2023, according to Gartner. The migration to cloud saw an acceleration at the onset of the pandemic and in the new post pandemic world, the adoption is only set to go up.

More enterprises are also embracing the multicloud strategy moving ahead. Already, 53% of Indian enterprises have increased their cloud adoption over the last one year, as per estimates from NASSCOM. However, many enterprises realized that their cloud is not living up to its full potential due to complexity and uncontrolled cloud sprawl; siloed, disparate environments; security risks; and rising costs, which has led to the emergence of a True Hybrid Cloud Model

Moving forward, more organisations will take a strategic approach that seamlessly connects a mix of clouds and on-prem environments. In the next phase of the evolved cloud, enterprises will turn to a unified control plane to remove management complexity, stay secure against evolving cyber threats, be sustainable, and cut costs through automation, whether their data resides on the cloud or on-prem. This will put organisations in a position to focus on innovation and drive their business.

Addressing the ICT Skills Gap

The skills gap among ICT talent is expected to intensify. A NASSCOM-Zinnov report has stated that by 2026, India could face a shortage of 1.4-1.9 million technologists. While digital transformation and cloud deployment continue to be priority for enterprises, the dearth of technical

Although upskilling is critical in narrowing the skills gap, enterprises need to recognize that hybrid multicloud architectures are highly complex. Managing multiple clouds and onpremises environments together can be tricky and inefficient. Going into 2023, we expect more organisations to simplify and standardize their operations, reducing their need for environment, cloud, and workload-specific skills.

Achieving True Sustainability

With the rising importance of ESG and focus on sustainability, enterprises increasingly require their IT infrastructure to be green and able to support their sustainability initiatives.

Creating greener value chains and solutions that can drive sustainable outcomes, including energy efficiency with their cloud and on-prem infrastructure will be crucial. This is in addition to providing improved methods for data categorization that enables buyers to look across their entire data estates and tier data, which is particularly effective in the cloud. For instance, if 68% of your data is used once and then never used again, moving the unused data to the cloud, where it can be tiered and moved to cold storage, can reduce your data’s carbon footprint and contribute to a better planet.

Businesses must look at helping customers minimize their carbon footprint by moving on-prem storage to inherently greener public clouds. Technology tools can be leveraged to audit consumption, locate waste, and automatically set guardrails to stop overprovisioning thereby helping reduce carbon emissions and cutting operational costs.

Pre-empting the Impact of Quantum Hybrid Computing on Cybersecurity

Companies need to think about data protection now more than ever. Data breaches and hackers are getting increasingly sophisticated, and companies need to be a step ahead in their data security measures to ensure protection of business-critical data.

The industry is already exploring how quantum hybrid models can help protect sensitive data more effectively and drive the development of new encryption protocols and algorithms. Businesses are increasingly looking at cloud-based approaches to solve data security challenges.

With cloud technology, the only constant is change. Companies must have a foresight on how and where they manage their data, security, and their hybrid, multicloud infrastructures.

PUNEET GUPTA MANAGING DIRECTOR AND VP INDIA / SAARC, NETAPP

“The industry is already exploring how quantum hybrid models can help protect sensitive data more effectively and drive the development of new encryption protocols and algorithms.”

The

will

seek to

BY

ACCOPS

DAAS: A PRE-REQUISITE FOR AN OMNIPRESENT HYBRID WORKFORCE

A state-of-the-art tool for the most advanced workforce on the planet

Executive Summary

Hybrid workforce is rapidly gaining momentum and is here to stay. A recent Gartner survey report states that 60% of all employees surveyed prefer a hybrid model. Further, 76% of employees working for a company that switched to remote work reported an overall improvement in culture since the shift occurred.

While it gives companies, a clear hook to keep employees happy and satisfied, the hybrid work model also presents multiple challenges. These include IT infrastructure complexities, data security, and increased costs associated with setting up a digital workspace.

To help organizations overcome challenges related to the digital workspace and make hybrid working seamless and completely secure, Accops provides a one-of-its-kind one-stop solution – the Accops Managed Desktops (AMD). The AMD can get users onboarded quickly as compared to traditional VDI deployments which take several weeks or even months.

The solution also provides a highly secure single point of contact to manage VDI environments, reducing the burden on IT teams already grappling with a burgeoning number of stakeholders and technologies.

For organizations looking to make the transition as smooth as possible, the Accops Managed Desktops (AMD) provides the much-needed agility and resilience while ensuring that all the security challenges are covered.

The whitepaper provides key insights about how enterprises can manage digital workspace more efficiently and make it future-ready.

Employees to choose, enterprises to enable

Companies that trust their employees to be efficient and productive irrespective of where they work from, are more likely to retain them. Also, employees who get the freedom to choose their workspace are reported to be happier with

a better work-life balance, less stress, and appear more focused.

While this seems like a solution where there are benefits for both the employee and the employer, there are several challenges for the enterprise to enable a secure and seamless work environment for a hybrid workforce. Some of the key challenges include:

1. Increased cyber security risks: As an increased number of employees work from home or public spaces, the risk of data being stolen or passing over insecure networks increases

manifold. Securing company and employee data with regular software updates, multi-factor authentication, password management systems and ad hoc processes are some of the essentials that enterprises must focus on.

2. Dealing with a diverse IT ecosystem: With a plethora of devices, apps, and systems being used in a hybrid work environment, IT teams must have a three-pronged approach to deal with data, network, and software security.t

3. Compliance issues: Enterprise must work on ways to enforce compliance across the

OVERVIEW

While Covid-19 brought remote working majorly into focus, about 17% of employees in the US worked from home five days per week even before the pandemic, a share that increased to 44% during the pandemic. In a post-pandemic world, employees and employers recognize that work is no longer associated with a physical place but can be done from anywhere.

eliminates the need for multiple products for different purposes. For the enterprise, this results in reduced overhead costs, easy provisioning, and management while ensuring a seamless experience for the end-users.

A one-stop solution

The AMD is a unique solution that combines three elements critical to managing a digital workspace – virtualization, Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) and Identity and Access Management (IAM). It provides end-to-end capabilities including:

- Multiple desktop profile options

- Contextual access

- Data leakage prevention and endpoint control

- Multi-factor authentication (MFA)

- Power management and capacity planning

- Integrated thin client provisioning and management

- Analytics driven user experience and performance monitoring

Key Benefits

1. Completely managed services: One of the biggest challenges for enterprise IT teams is the complexity of managing and securing virtual desktops. The AMD solution not only simplifies this process significantly but also offers extended services for managing the VDI environment.

2. Enhanced security solutions: With security being of paramount importance, the AMD solution offers advanced customization of security features and policies based on the user role and the criticality of the data involved. It also allows IT teams to enable contextual access and evaluate every access request based on parameters like user role, the device used, geo-location, time etc., before granting permissions.

3. Cost optimization by design: The AMD solution ensures that there is no upfront CapEx while enabling an extremely competitive OpEx. It has a simple, one-stop licensing model with no hidden costs or conditions. A quick onboarding of end-users means that enterprises can get started right away. Also, upkeep and maintenance does not require the enterprise IT teams to acquire special skill sets or undergo major training.

workplaces with regulations, and across devices.

4. Enabling uninterrupted access: Employees expect and need full access to critical apps, CRMs, and other systems anywhere, even with low bandwidth. Organizations must invest in ways to ensure continuous streaming of all the necessary applications to make their workforce productive under all conditions.

Accops Managed Desktops (AMD): powering VDI infrastructure, empowering employees

For several leading organizations across industries, the Accops Managed Desktops has emerged as the go-to solution to overcome challenges related to a hybrid workforce. A fully managed, turnkey Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution, AMD enables a secure work-from-anywhere environment that is quick to rollout, easy to manage and delivers a superior user experience.

Unlike most other pay-as-you-go models for virtual desktops, AMD is a holistic work-fromanywhere platform based on a subscription model. It offers an in-built security function that

4. Flexible provisioning models: Enterprise users can choose the topology and design depending on the level of control and customization required by their IT teams.

AMD: Ensuring a secure virtual workspace

The AMD helps enterprises transform across three - areas – mobility, productivity, and compliance. Accops has three main products - HySecure (ZTNA - Security), HyWorks (Virtualization), HyID (IAM), HyDesk (Thin Clients) all of which

help to create a secure, virtual workspace for employees.

1. Mobility:

• Work from anywhere:

o The AMD is an all-in-one solution that helps enterprise IT teams build a highly flexible and scalable IT infrastructure.

o AMD also helps address security and management issues inherent of a remote work model, quickly and efficiently.

• Business continuity:

o AMD helps enterprise IT teams keep critical functions up and running by swiftly enabling secure access to business applications from anywhere.

o This means that businesses can tide over disruptions driven by a global pandemic or a local calamity.

• Speedy onboarding of vendors and developers:

o The solution allows companies to accelerate the provisioning of secure digital workspaces, be it for employees, vendors, or contract workers.

o Companies can seamlessly revoke access if an employee quits, or if a vendor contract ends.

2. Productivity:

• VDI for contact center employees with VoIP: The solution enables enterprise IT teams to deliver standardized desktops, CRM, and other applications to contact center employees, whether in-house, on-contract or working from home. It also enables uninterrupted streaming of wire-speed voice to users’ devices even over low bandwidth networks.

• Secure delivery of critical and graphicsrich applications: The solution enables IT teams to quickly deliver business-critical as well as graphics-rich applications to employees working from anywhere, using any device with unparalleled security and quality. Employees can access data powered with enriched image and text clarity along with accuracy, enabling them to be productive when working from anywhere.

3. Compliance:

• Making virtual workspaces compliant: AMD offers features like Multi-factor Authentication (MFA), fingerprint authentication, facial authentication, continuous monitoring, and strict Data Loss Prevention (DLP) features, ensuring that IT teams retain control over corporate resources and create a compliant virtual workspace.

• Adhering to regulatory norms: By leveraging the AMD solution, enterprises can easily provide contextual and risk-based access to users to ensure compliance with RBI, GLBA and other guidelines. The solution also provides detailed audit logs to enable IT teams get insights into user activities for efficient management and control.

• Approve specific devices for every user: The solution allows IT teams to apply multiple parameters like log-in time, device location, and device fingerprint to ensure that there is only a single approved device for every user to prevent unauthorized access.

AMD driving growth and efficiency across industries

By helping organizations deliver enhanced device and workspace flexibility, security and cost efficiency, AMD is powering organizations to become more agile and competitive.

1. Enabled an accounting company to reduce attrition by 70% and save 50% on office rent:

Challenge:

A global leading accounting firm was facing high attrition level and cost of hiring, adversely impacting company growth and revenue.

Solution:

By incorporating AMD, the customer was able to provide flexible remote working alternatives, leading to a decrease in attrition levels by 70%. With more employees working remotely, the organization could also earn collateral benefit of saving on office rent by almost 50%.

2. Enabled a leading IT services provider to reduce OpEx by 25%

Challenge

Like most businesses affected by the pandemic, the customer was looking to streamline operations impacted by the disruption. Solution:

With the help of AMD, the company was able to provide secure access to business-critical data and applications to employees working remotely across diverse geographies, ensuring business continuity, enhanced productivity and decrease in operational cost by 25%.

3. Enabled the 3rd largest public sector bank (PSB) of India to enhance security and compliance Challenge

The PSB was looking for digital workspace solution backed with banking-grade security system to enable compliant access to SWIFT and CBS applications from office or remotely. Solution

The AMD solution provided the bank with key benefits like:

- Enhanced productivity as the solution delivered greater agility to the employees. Users could access both, SWIFT and CBS applications from a single PC.

- Strict compliance through biometric authentication and DLP features

- Secure remote access to critical apps for employees working from home

- 50% lesser TCO compared to competitor solutions

Conclusion

For organizations to be able to tide the next disruption, leaders must closely watch and respond to employee demands without compromising on budgets, security concerns, and corporate governance policies. With the AMD solution, organizations can enable a highly customized secure, and collaborative digital workspace that provides a rich user experience to employees in a cost-effective way.

ANIL KAMBLE DIRECTOR – INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY LGT WEALTH INDIA PVT. LTD.

BY SANJAY @ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

When sun rise and sunset happens properly people call this magic trick but when things go wrong everyone start doing analysis and predictions. Similar things go with a customer’s he goes to the store and finds exactly what he need neatly stacked on shelves. If customer order online, they can receive a box on their porch as quickly as one or two days later. In many places, people have become accustomed to these conveniences. But when the supply chain is disrupted by local events like natural disasters or global events (like pandemics, War), suddenly the magic seems like it was all smoke and mirrors.

Supply chain disruptions create scary and uncertain times for businesses and consumers alike. They also draw attention to our supply chain dependencies that we are otherwise not

CHAIN DISRUPTION AND MANAGE GROWTH

aware of when everything is operating like a well-oiled machine. Sometimes these disruptions are small and localized, and may affect only a few businesses or industries. Other times they are globally felt, especially when the hard-hit region is a source of a diverse range of supplies. The COVID-19 global pandemic has caused a major upheaval in the supply chains of many businesses’ world over. Similar things happens when RussiaUkraine war started in Feb 2022.

A supply chain is a network of people, organizations, and activities that move a product from a supplier to a final customer. A supply chain disruption is any sudden change or crisis be it local or global that negatively impacts that process. The original equipment manufacturer (OEM) is at the top of the pyramid. Tier 1 suppliers are the last step before the OEM. They are the final step before the OEM which may market and distribute the product to end users.

Tier 2 suppliers produce and supply parts to Tier 1 suppliers. They are usually smaller businesses, but no less important in the supply chain. They must adhere to strict safety and regulatory standards to make sure their products will be accepted by Tier 1 companies. Tier 3 suppliers are the foundation of the supply chain in that they provide raw materials like metal and plastics from which the other suppliers can construct specific products. This interdependent chain can experience delays and inefficiencies regardless of where the disruption occurs. These effects are compounded when one supplier is the only source for that part of the supply chain or when

one area holds most of the options for a particular supply.

Cyber attacks can occur to any business at any time who has not adequately protected themselves. Supply chain can also inadvertently open you up to attacks. If any link in your chain has lax security protocols, that may be an opportunity for hackers to get access to data. Once the data is compromised the supply chain can be disturbed.

It’s a good idea to take stock of where the market demand is and how it may have shifted. In light of the pandemic, as an example, the increase of online ordering skyrocketed as businesses closed their physical storefronts. Now, as more people are working remotely and using technology to their shopping advantage, they want goods that meet their current needs. Reviewing data will show trends in purchases and allow to make more informed decisions about restocking or readjusting inventory.

By streamlining efficiencies, using new technologies will help companies lower their operational costs and be more flexible in their supply chain process. Technology can promote automating processes and accelerating business growth through data-driven decisions. Once business gets 360-degree view, they can plan to curb supply chain disruption.

I think as a CIO one must be vigilant on cutting age technology and keep deploying a wide range of technology and focusing on delivering new capabilities quickly across the entire business. CIO must be astute in both business and innovative pace of technology change.

“A supply chain disruption is any sudden change or crisis be it local or global that negatively impacts that process.”

Supply chain disruptions create scary and uncertain times for businesses and consumers alike

SUPPLY

FLASHBACK 2022 – RECAP OF RENDS

A look at dominant trends during the year

The Year 2022 started on a promising note. The world was showing strong signs of recovering, businesses were raring to go even as economies around the world were bouncing back. And then the Russian invasion of Ukraine happened and economies, businesses and demand went into a downward spiral.

Yet things did recover, thanks to smart technology adoption such as predictive analytics and AI, smart automation and accelerated adoption of Clouds. And as the remote working model gained momentum and people began to live a digital life, hacking became a formidable industry even as ransomware demands skyrocketed. Statesponsored cyber terrorism reached a new high with increased ingressions into utility and state infrastructure systems.

Cyber security has taken on disproportionate attention of the business and security teams have catapulted from the fringe of the IT departments

to the front and center of the organization. So strong is the risk to businesses today that cyber security has become a CEO responsibility with corporate boards routinely tracking and discussing cyber security strategies.

The team at Enterprise IT has deliberated on what the dominant technology trends in 2022 had been and here is our take on the buzzwords, triggers and adoption patterns.

Hybrid Workplace

Work from home and remote working necessitated by the Covid-pandemic disruptions has changed the workplace forever. Even though initially it was challenging to ensure business continuity and facilitate employees to securely access enterprise resources in a seamless manner; collaborate with co-workers, external partners and ecosystem; businesses have figured out systems and processes to enable all this and more.

Businesses were not only able to tide over the lockdown but the experience has forever changed the expectation of stakeholders. Employees are

comfortable working from remote locations with occasional in-office presence for meetings, and organizations have scaled down physical office premises with robust systems to support a hybrid work environment.

In fact, more employees are unwilling to return to the office and prefer the hybrid model as it enables to prioritize personal well-being, enhance productivity and maintain a work-life balance. What’s more employees in India are more likely

Work from home and remote working necessitated by the Covid-pandemic disruptions has changed the workplace forever.

to stay in the current job if given a hybrid work option, according to a global survey by HP. The survey which comprised a large base of Indian respondents finds that hybrid work place in India will continue and organizations are re-evaluating strategies to offer an environment that offers flexibility and work-life balance. The survey highlighted employees priority on personal wellbeing and how organizations are supporting with new policies, technologies and tools.

The next-generation office space is characterized by small collaboration spaces, desks used on a hotel-style scheduling system, meeting and conference areas that are highly flexible, and a high dependence on UC to support distributed video collaboration.

Technology enablement such as Cloudbased access to applications, digital workspace replete with rich collaboration tools that enable multiple teams to work together seamlessly from anywhere, document management systems, zero-trust approaches to security have bolstered hybrid workplaces.

Companies and business leaders agree going forward there will be three distinct types of workers. The remote worker who prefers to work from home, participate in virtual meetings and visit

the office occasionally. The fully in-office worker comprising managers, clerical staff and executive assistants, department heads and executives who need to meet peers constantly, and the hybrid worker who comes to office part of the week but has a highly flexible schedule and work effectively in a variety of settings.

IT companies are taking the lead in paying heed to employees’ preference for hybrid workplace and many companies have declared employee presence in office for three days only. Some companies are redesigning the workplace to accommodate the new normal replacing cabins with central workspace surrounded by collaborative spaces where groups can get together for discussions.

Cyber Security

Undoubtedly this has captured everyone’s mindshare, not just business but individual users as well. As digital proliferates with smart phones into the nooks and corners of the country, government, institutions and organizations are on an overdrive to raise awareness about security practices and combat cyber frauds.

As ingenious fraudsters stepped up to make opportunistic killing befooling unsuspecting citizens with tricks, news about novel ways of cheating went viral on digital and social media. From posing as delivery boys asking for OTPs to posing as customer care executives helping to update KYC details, criminals pushed the creative boundaries.

India Inc faced an unprecedented increase

More employees are unwilling to return to the office and prefer the hybrid model as it enables to prioritize personal well-being, enhance productivity and maintain a work-life balance.

in cyberattacks—in the first three months of 2022, India witnessed 18 million cyberattacks and threats, an average of 200,000 attacks every day, according to US based cyber security firm, Norton.

What is worrying is that Indian businesses badly needed a refresh of the cyber security approaches and technologies currently being employed. According to a study by Cisco 37% of the cyber security technologies used by companies in India are considered outdated by cyber security and privacy professionals working in these organizations.

At the enterprise level zero trust has become a gospel for security. Although the phase has been around for sometime now, zero trust triggered interest and adoption gathered momentum amongst businesses.

Zero Trust is an approach to secure the entire infrastructure with a range of strategies that are designed for breach. Nobody is trusted automatically, even after clearing the perimeter—instead all identities are verified, minimum access is granted based on context, and activities are monitored to make sure controls are working as expected.

The concept is not new and has been evolving over time with the idea first presented in 2004 as deperimeterization by Jericho Forum, which is now part of Open Group Security Forum. The term zero trust was popularized by Forrester Research analyst, John Kindervag, in 2009 when he propounded that security strategy must be designed to “never trust, always verify”.

The increasing use of people inside the perimeter via phishing, vulnerable email attachments and poisoned URLs means that more often the attack effectively begins from inside the safe space. Zero trust approach addresses this concern

According to the recent Automation Now & Next report, India is a leading adopter of intelligent automation with 67% of surveyed respondents deploying more than 300 bots across the organization.

At the enterprise level zero trust has become a gospel for security. Although the phase has been around for sometime now, zero trust triggered interest and adoption gathered momentum amongst businesses.

rejecting the assumption that the inside of the perimeter is a safe to an assumption that nobody within or outside the environment can be trusted.

According to Cisco’s “Security Outcomes Study Volume 2, zero-trust approaches have penetrated well into Indian organizations with nearly nine in 10 (89 per cent) respondents in India said the company is investing in a ‘Zero Trust’ strategy, with 44 per cent making steady progress in adoption and 45 per cent are at a mature state of

implementing it.

Automation

Businesses in India are accelerating the impact of digital transformation with rapid adoption of RPA, intelligent automation backed by analytics and AI. Spurred by a need to overcome frequent disruptions and reduce human interfaces during the Covid pandemic, businesses took to automate processes. Post pandemic these measures are

According to Nasscom, Indian organizations reported a 45 per cent increase in AI usage which is the highest among all the countries.

helping businesses to reap the benefits of efficiencies of scale, enhanced productivity and higher transparency which is further fueling adoption across more business processes.

According to the recent Automation Now & Next report, India is a leading adopter of intelligent automation with 67% of surveyed respondents deploying more than 300 bots across the organization. These organizations have experienced impactful outcomes and a vast majority are planning to expand the budget within the next year.

Use cases of automation have been many and varied. From process automation within the organization such as managing payroll and employee onboarding to automating purchase order, onboarding suppliers, invoicing and managing the inventory. Indian businesses have benefitted by automating supply chain to simplify operations and better manage complexities. The Automation Now & Next report finds that 96% of surveyed organizations have adopted supply chain automation and 86% have found it has helped to address staffing shortages.

Intelligent automation has largely revolutionized care delivery and marketing efforts. A large part of customer care has been automated with voice and text bots and intelligent routing of customer calls to contact center enabling companies to reduce the volume of traffic to the contact center.

Design thinking in customer care with data and digital strategies at the core are helping companies to sharpen the CX strategy. Datadriven insights are enabling companies to better address customer pain points proactively and send fewer calls to the contact center. Calls are routed by AI-powered algorithms, providing the context for customer engagement empowering the staff up-to-speed to engage in an empathetic manner. The contact center staff can view customer information from multiple sources in an integrated manner and the insights equip customer executives to resolve queries instantly.

Artificial Intelligence

Indian companies are fast adopting Artificial

Intelligence (AI) to achieve a range of business objectives to make core business decisions as well as discrete business functions such as facial recognition and customer service. There is considerable maturity in thinking and deploying AI and early adopters are showing the way with best practices.

According to Deloitte India’s State of AI in India based on a survey of 200 business leaders, 39 percent of the surveyed businesses were looking at more than 20 percent increase in AI investments. Nearly half of the surveyed respondents achieved quicker-than-expected payback on AI investments this year. Interestingly, those reporting a slower-than-expected payback also fared better in 2022. However, the report found that while India Inc. might invest in enhancing existing AI infrastructure, it will be skeptical of making any major capital-intensive investments until the general business sentiment improves.

The industry verticals betting bigger on AI include Life Sciences and Health Care, Financial Services, Technology, Media, and Telecom, and Consumer Services, planning to increase AI investments by more than 20 percent.

According to Nasscom, Indian organizations reported a 45 per cent increase in AI usage which is the highest among all the countries. AI implementations are being seen in a wide variety of use cases—from eliminating process efficiencies in financial companies, predictive maintenance of machineries, customized manufacturing, personalization in retail and recommendation engines to using data in real time business decision making, AI is getting deeply embedded at the core and in day-to-day play of business operations.

AI adoption is being driven by companies seeking to achieve competitive edge by integrating it as part of the larger organizational transformation. For instance, manufacturing companies are upgrading machinery and equipment to adopt IT-OT integration and leverage the benefits of AI such as predictive maintenance, enhance workplace security, etc.

However, scaling AI projects is more challenging than starting them. The wider adoption of best practices, such as MLOps/AIOps, is key to sustaining AI initiatives in the long run.

AR/VR

Even though the impact of Artificial Reality and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) is yet to be accertained, there is a lot of interest and organizations have experimented with proof of concepts. From enhancing customer experience, new possibilities for entertainment, accelerating product development to education and training capabilities, AR/VR will transition the world to scenarios envisaged in science fictions.

During the pandemic, AR/VR adoption received a boost as mass production of PPEs using 3D printing was all done using VR/ AR and frontline workers training was delivered via AR/ VR.

Enterprises in sports and entertainment, and transportation and logistics are also keen to use AR/VR for training and operational purposes. Many Indian businesses consider AR/VR one of the key digital technologies that will positively impact their business. Immersive technologies were helping EdTech sector improve learning outcomes, increase overall engagement and interactivity.

As more greenfield manufacturing plants are being rolled out, AR/VR is used to deliver training and simulation and induct semi-skilled workers into the production line faster. Further, AR/VR technologies are being deployed for maintenance, repair and operations, worker safety and training, engineering and design modelling.

The Indian Government is also trying to promote Industry 4.0 through the Made in India and the Startup India initiative by offering subsidies to MSMEs for training in smart manufacturing.

The challenge for AR/VR implementation is to select the right use case. And so, despite initial

The challenge for AR/ VR implementation is to select the right use case. The industry must shift the focus from the technology itself and educate the market with compelling solutions and train users for higher adoption.

Scaling AI projects is more challenging than starting them. The wider adoption of best practices, such as MLOps/AIOps, is key to sustaining AI initiatives in the long run.

interest, it fizzles out as companies are unable to measure the benefits. Another challenge is that most companies are promoting the technology rather than the solution. The industry must shift the focus from the technology itself and educate the market with compelling solutions and train users for higher adoption. Moreover, AR/VR are not just not just engineering and technology as there are number of psychological factors which must be addressed by UX designers to deliver a rich experience.

The recent launch of 5G in India has spurred interest amongst consumer and business with avid gamers are already using AR / VR. Beyond gaming, there is growing interest in the use of AR / VR for education in schools and professional colleges.

Metaverse will be the next generation of Internet wherein 3D experiences will be delivered through AR and VR devices and shared via augmented and virtual world. It will have digital twins of people and all the spaces in the world will be virtually created and open for anyone to enter. This will create a big shift in the way businesses operate.

Hybrid Cloud

Having tasted the benefits of Cloud offerings, businesses are now deploying complex workloads and extracting deeper benefits by betting big on multiple Cloud and deployment options. A Forrester report says that Cloud adoption has increased with 91% of respondents in India using some form of Cloud and that around 46% of the application workload is already in the Cloud. The report noted that high Cloud uptake is due to the large number of data centers in the APAC region which boasts 37% of the data center globally.

Businesses are exploring colocation, private Cloud, and multiple public Cloud to take advantage of the benefits offered in specific deployment environment. Adopting hybrid Cloud is enabling

organizations to embrace a best-of-breed approach to meet specific business goals—a right blend of speed, flexibility, scalability, and reliability while meeting data security, governance, compliance, performance issues in a cost-effective manner.

For example, applications that have high requirement for scalability such as mobile apps, web portals and ecommerce applications are ideally suited for the Cloud while applications that comprise sensitive company information and customer information may be deployed on private Cloud to comply with data privacy norms. A common use case is to leverage Cloud environment for dev and test purposes. Given the long procurement cycles in a traditional datacenter, Cloud enables to quickly test any application or new features cost-effectively and iterate frequently.

On-premise deployments still have relevance as many core applications are already running and some home-grown applications may not be stable enough to migrate. Other scenarios where traditional on-premise environment make sense include applications and workloads are latency sensitive; require high level of security and privacy; home-grown applications; legacy applications that have lot of dependencies within the current environment will continue to operate from traditional data centers.

Hybrid Cloud is an imperative for heavily regulated industries such as banking, financial services, healthcare which are subject to regulatory requirements and cannot deploy all workloads in public Cloud. Sensitive data related to patients and customer data must be stored securely in traditional environment. Yet these businesses also operate in a competitive environment and the need for agility make public Cloud a compelling proposition.

Organizations are moving to the Cloud to get high performance, scalability, agility, flex-

ibility and achieve cost-efficiencies. But Cloud deployments require best practices and advanced technologies such as DevOps and Containers. It is difficult for organization to hire, build and retain that kind of skill sets and the partner ecosystem is providing these skill sets.

Making hybrid Cloud work requires a strategic approach as things are different in the Cloud compared to traditional IT and companies prefer to work with a third-party specialized partner that understand the nuances of the Cloud ecosystem, designing Cloud-native design architectures and applications that are designed for scalability, embed DevOps practices and are secure by design.

Conclusion

Most of the above technology trends will continue its march in the coming year. Given that technology operates within an economic and business environment, the outlook for the coming year suggests similar trends. Futuristic technologies such as AR/VR will find more use cases and the business value will be more clearly articulated while foundational technologies such as automation, hybrid Cloud and zero-trust approaches will see steady adoption.

Cyber security will likely dominate headlines as criminal syndicates will continue to flourish finding novel ways of breaching vulnerabilities. Gartner has predicted that more CEOs will have the compensation and performance metrics linked to business risks, including cyber security.

A theme that found resonance during the year was sustainability, and the coming year will see a lot of activity around this area. Most sustainability discussions by the IT industry was aimed at getting headlines and restricted to providing a marketing spin to existing solutions.

However, 2023 will see technology vendors getting the act together and offering thoughtful solutions to enable businesses conduct activities in a sustainable and measurable manner.

Making hybrid Cloud work requires a strategic approach as things are different in the Cloud compared to traditional IT. Companies must understand the nuances of the Cloud ecosystem to design Cloud-native architectures and applications embed DevOps practices and security by design principles.

BY AMBIKA @ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

ESDS

INSIGHTS INTO THE DATA CENTER INDUSTRY 2022

The overall market trend in the past year and what to expect in the year ahead

How was the year 2022 for ESDS in India?

What is more important for a business? Getting large orders or orders with high profitability?

ESDS has on boarded its top 3 customers in the history of ESDS, with the highest profitability. So, that is the value of the year 2022 for us, and the good thing is that two of these customers have come to us for a large Data Center requirement.

In addition, the world’s largest smart city in the making has chosen to deploy eNlight 360 for its private cloud setup in Saudi Arabia, becoming one of the important success stories for ESDS.

What is your other observation for the past year?

People have certain perceptions, and there would also be your readers who would have certain perceptions. So, I ask the readers what they saw about ESDS in the media in 2022 and what perception they had about ESDS from the media? This amazing year has given a very important direction to ESDS. We have chosen to give maximum weightage to become a highly profitable organization. An organization that makes 18 to 20% PAT, at minimum. That is the focus we have got in the year 2022, which could not have happened to us before. I shall always rate year 2022 and year 2006 above every other year in the history of ESDS. Why 2006? Please search for *Entrepreneur with the Fire Within* and read my book.

What were the market challenges for you this year?

The year 2022 will be remembered by the markets for three significant incidences—first, the RussiaUkraine war; no one anticipated a long-term war between two major economies. The second is the

Indian stock market reaching a record-breaking all-time high. After the Russia-Ukraine war, the markets did see a slump, but they have bounced back and have reached their peak; that’s a very good sign for the Indian economy. Finally, the meltdown of the tech sector, the American tech sector, and also the B2C companies of India, the kind of disaster that happened in the B2C companies of India which got listed. No one ever in the past had seen investors losing their principle. People who invested in the IPO of these B2C companies lost their principle as well. These were some of the most important and the ones that provided us with crucial learnings like being very real is now going to be important from 2023 onwards. You have to run a highly profitable company, and only then will you be respected in the market. Because investors, once they have lost their principle, will not trust companies bringing their IPOs until and unless they are highly profitable.

How do you want to close this year?

Like any other organization, we at ESDS look forward to ending this year “With a Big Win,” as they say. Amidst all the other crucial day-today business, what has got us pumping at the end of the year and has thrilled us to end it on a high note is a significant BFSI opportunity. Before the end of December 2022, we hope to conclude this order that sizes equivalent to the turnover we had in FY’22. So it’s an important order for us to win and we are very strongly positioned in the opportunity. There are a couple of more large orders in the pipeline, and we hope to win those orders; negotiations are on. So let’s see what the New Year brings for us. If 2022 has been so fantastic, what is there in 2023? Let us see.

What are your thoughts on the demand for Data Center investments within India?

The Data Center market in India just six years back was only 2000cr rupees. We had merely a 100MW capacity six years back. Today, India has touched 1GW of Data Center Capacity, and very soon, this will jump to 3GW, Yes, you read it right, its going to be 3000 MegaWatt by 2027. Do you know where exactly it is going to be compared to other economies? It is expected to go beyond where America is today. In just five years’ time, India is going to surpass the capacity of America. America today stands at 2.7 GW, and India would surpass that. This kind of growth is happening in Data Center markets in India. From 2,000Cr 6 years back to 20,000 Cr now to 50,000Cr in 5 to 6 years time. This is the kind of growth that is happening for Data Centers in India. This is a country where you have to be very strong and be very vigilant when you are making investments here. Some smart DC companies would give you exorbitant returns in the next couple of years’ time.

How are you attracting global clients for your services?

ESDS is amongst very few Indian Cloud and Data Center companies that have started expanding business outside India with its portfolio of Cloud solutions and Managed services. We have won orders from large banks in the Middle East; one of the world’s top smart city projects is running on our private cloud platform; they are going to use our flagship product, eNlight 360. Apart from this top 5 banks in Bahrain have started using our Software services as well as our managed services. We are entering the continent of Africa also, the entire education, health-tech that is happening in Africa we are going to play a crucial role along with some of our partners over there. Our major partners functioning in Africa and the Middle East region have started getting large orders for ESDS, and we have started delivering our unique and path-breaking products like eNlight 360, IPAS, VTMScan, and a couple of other software services in those markets.

What trends do you foresee in 2023 in the Data Center industry in India?

Data Center Industry in India in the year 2022 grew at more than 25% CAGR, but in 2023 I am expecting it to accelerate further as the launch events of major multinational Data Center com-

panies are expected out of Navi Mumbai, Noida, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru. The requirement that MSEDCL has got in Navi Mumbai itself is 3 GW. So MSEDCL, TATA Power, Adani Power, and

BEST have received consolidated requirements of 3GW in Mumbai and majorly in Navi Mumbai. That is the kind of scale-up that is happening in Navi Mumbai. This gives us a clear vision of the

exorbitant rate by which the Data Center Industry is expected to grow across the country and majorly in these four metro cities in India.

PIYUSH SOMANI CHAIRMAN & MANAGING DIRECTOR, ESDS SOFTWARE SOLUTION LTD.

“This amazing year has given a very important direction to ESDS. We have chosen to give maximum weightage to become a highly profitable organization.”

PURE STORAGE

PURE STORAGE SHARES UPDATE ON BUSINESS MOMENTUM IN INDIA AND PREDICTIONS FOR 2023

Pure Storage shared an update on the company’s business momentum as well as their predictions for the industry in 2023

RAMANUJAM KOMANDURI COUNTRY MANAGER, PURE STORAGE INDIA

“The transformation of India into a digital economy is taking place at an astonishing pace, accelerated by the pandemic. Pure’s technologies are a critical enabler for this digitalisation and we are grateful to our customers and partners for putting their faith in our ability to support their digital transformation.”

Pure Storage shared an update on the company’s business momentum as well as their predictions for the industry in 2023. Globally, the company continues to record solid growth. For its fiscal third quarter, ended November 6, 2022, Pure recorded revenue of US$676 million, up 20% year-over-year and subscription services revenue of US$244.8 million, up 30% year-over-year.

In India, Pure continues to execute well on its strategy of providing the most advanced, reliable, and energy-efficient technology to satisfy the mission-critical data storage and manage-

ment needs of its customers and this has been demonstrated by its continued ability to outpace the market. According to the IDC Quarterly Enterprise Storage Tracker, in Q3, 2022, Pure grew 590.5% while the overall market in India declined by 2.8%.

“The transformation of India into a digital economy is taking place at an astonishing pace, accelerated by the pandemic. Pure’s technologies are a critical enabler for this digitalisation and we are grateful to our customers and partners for putting their faith in our ability to support their

digital transformation,” said Ramanujam Komanduri, Country Manager, Pure Storage India.

2023 Predictions

Pure also shared its predictions for what will happen in 2023. “Amid rising inflation and recession risks, strengthening resilience, reducing the total cost of ownership, and optimising resources will move up the corporate agenda. This will have implications for technology investments in the region,” said Sudharsan Aravamuthan, Head of Systems Engineering, India, Pure Storage.

Future of flash: 2023 will be the year of

density for flash storage

Advancements in flash storage such as QLC (quad-level cell) and DirectFlash are lowering the cost and increasing density in flash to the point where many organisations are starting to replace their legacy spinning disk storage with flash. With increasing scrutiny on environmental sustainability, the energy and space savings that they get from flash is another reason why companies are moving away from legacy spinning disk. In 2023, we expect to see densities in flash storage really take a leap forward, increasing its suitability for Tier 2 and even Tier 3 workloads.

Anywhere Service Economy: Barriers to Anywhere Service Economy will be lowered further in 2023

The shift in investment in IT towards flexible consumption models such as subscription-based and pay-as-you-grow methods will accelerate in 2023. This is being driven by a cultural shift within organisations particularly those that depend on external investors. Investment bodies and boards of directors are increasingly looking favourably at companies that don’t hold a lot of capital assets. This provides them with the financial flexibility to invest in more strategic areas of the business. This will result in the Anywhere Service Economy expanding even further in 2023.

Supply chain: Manufacturing processes

will be re-architected to mitigate supply chain disruptions

Businesses will be hard-pressed to rethink their software development/product engineering cycles, as supply chain issues persist amid geopolitical tensions. This will lead organisations to consider a more modular approach that will enable them to reuse and repurpose standard components. Such an approach offers greater flexibility to complete projects in the face of supply chain disruptions, while preventing duplicated efforts in the software development lifecycle. By rejigging software development and product engineering processes to incorporate part reusability, organisations can better mitigate supply chain risks and strengthen resilience.

ESG: ESG accountability will filter from the boardroom deep down into the organisation

ESG will continue to increase in importance for most companies, but there will be a renewed focus on accountability and demonstrated action. Governments are coming up with policies and tax regulations to limit carbon emissions, and organisations will need to comply with new standards. Investors, partners, and consumers are increasingly considering ESG practices and performance in their decision to support an organisation. With stakeholders demanding ESG integrity, there is ongoing pressure to drive organisation-wide transformation that encompasses ESG strategy

and reporting. There will also be increasing focus on Social and Governance aspects of ESG not just to meet regulations but to meet expectations of customers, partners and employees.

Data protection: Data security will shift towards rapid recovery capabilities

The threat goes beyond ransomware: data retrieval and recovery is no longer a given, in spite of paying attackers their desired ransom. With hackers changing their tactics from merely locking data for ransom to outrightly stealing data, relying on cybersecurity insurance policies as a last-resort safety net can no longer provide adequate data protection in 2023. Organisations will be more inclined to take a “safer data” approach – employing unified fast file and object storage platforms that provide the last line of defence against ransomware or rogue employees, while offering quick recovery speeds.

Containers: Nanoservices will enter the conversation in 2023

With increasing adoption of containers and microservices, 2023 will see nanoservices start to enter the conversation. These are designed for single function applications and are even simpler to run than microservices. An example would be a news site that uses a nanoservice to just run headlines or pull in weather data.

BY AMBIKA @ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

FLEXIBLE AND MODERN IT SUPPORT TOOLS WILL HELP ENTERPRISES SCALE UP IN 2023, GOTO

Indian market is rising as the most important destinations for SaaS and adoption of cloud-based consolidated IT support and management platform will address the needs of businesses in 2023

What is GoTo’s market strategy to revolutionize IT management for enterprises?

GoTo is an all-in-one solution provider for remote working tools. We create robust IT support and business communication tools that businesses require to effortlessly communicate with their teams and assist their clients and workers. So, creating a solid entry point to serve the enterprises is our main objective. Working with channel partners is a crucial component of our growth strategy. In addition to our direct sales efforts, we are utilizing our partners’ networks and customer base to expand our geographical reach across India. The mapping out of partner journeys is a crucial step. It will enable us to have the partner-customer connections we want, which will not only help us accelerate our market expansion but also lead to increased sales, higher retention rates, and customer satisfaction. In addition to that, we’re leveraging distributors such as Technobind and Ingram Micro and their partner network and customer base to complement our direct sales effort to enable a wide geographical reach throughout India.

Please share your thoughts on the kind of technological trends that have been shaping businesses post pandemic?

According to the findings of our State of Work Life poll with Frost & Sullivan, 43% of businesses believe that the impact of the hybrid or remote work model has made IT administration more challenging. Traditionally, the IT budget

was only used to manage physical resources. However, today, it also requires taking into account elements like knowledge upskilling and technological advancement. Major technological trends that have sustained business operations throughout the turbulent years of the pandemic and are expected to enhance business resilience in the coming times are:

» Cloudification – It is the embrace of the cloud as a technology and a method for business change. With a significant shift towards digitalization across all levels of the technological stack— software, applications, platforms, infrastructure, and services—this trend is predicted to continue.

» Network security – Maximum security across cloud and network settings is referred to as “zero trust security.” Businesses are finding the cloud-based zero trust architecture to be both affordable and simple to use.

» Video conferencing – Video conferencing is essential in order to facilitate decision making with greater proficiency, and to enable an additional means for customers to connect, interact and communicate with their chosen brand, which is fueling further development of video collaboration solutions.

What industries have adopted your technologies?

GoTo is already working with many channel partners and GSIs to co-create resilient IT support tools for businesses of all sizes. Our solutions have seen extensive adoption among BFSI, ITES, BPO/ OIT, Higher Education and Healthcare-focused businesses to better support and connect their

workforce and customers securely.

We recently announced our partnership with Shahi Exports, India’s largest apparel manufacturer, to expedite its digital transformation operation. Shahi Exports employs a large number of help desk agents to manage a distributed workforce throughout its operations. The collaboration is a part of Shahi’s continuous efforts to improve the IT infrastructure throughout all 50 of its cutting-edge production facilities. GoTo Resolve will be crucial as an enterprise-grade platform that gives Shahi easy remote access and administration capability for IT assistance. GoTo’s adaptable platform will include support desk ticketing, multi-agent cooperation to address problems more quickly and effectively, a live dashboard to monitor agent performance, and report creations.

Skillrary credited GoTo and GoTo Webinar for helping its training organization stay connected with students during the pandemic as well as users who expect a plug-and-play collaborative tool. GoTo filled a much-needed gap in empowering their employees who are increasingly operating in a remote work environment. Skillray has been impressed by GoTo Webinar’s performance and with the 24x7 support which optimized the user experience.

From a global standpoint, Rescue has been used by FUJIFILM to boost its web-based remote support solution, improve customer satisfaction, and achieve cost savings across Asia Pacific. Lenovo is another Rescue customer and first implemented the solution back in 2010 for remote support. With Rescue, Lenovo has been able to achieve a lower handle time and a lower time to delivery of service, reducing the cost per incident, resulting in approximately $1 million in savings per year

Working through channel partners is a core part of our expansion strategy. TCS, Cognizant, Infosys, Wipro, HCL and Tech Mahindra are some of our significant Global System Integrators partners who enable us a wide geographical reach across the Globe. In some cases, GSI’s also act as Managed Service Providers (MSP), embedding our solution along with their solutions/platforms to serve multiple customers. We’re leveraging our partner’s network and customer base to complement our direct sales effort to enable our wide geographical reach throughout India.

Cybersecurity is not just an IT issue today. It is a challenge for businesses of all sizes throughout the world. Modern organizations are becoming

What factors should enterprises consider while addressing the proliferating demand for a robust cybersecurity system?

MATHEW PHILIP SENIOR DIRECTOR & COUNTRY MANAGER, SALES - GOTO

management.

easier targets, with cyberattacks on large corporations making headlines every day. Businesses are at serious risk in the current cybersecurity environment, primarily because they are unaware of their own vulnerabilities and threats. When selecting software solutions, security and steadfastness are two of the most important determining variables. This is particularly important for small enterprises with constrained IT resources. Our study, conducted in collaboration with Frost & Sullivan, found that support for IT process automation assistance (28%), assuring performance and reliability (25%), and increasing staff productivity (25%), are the top three selection criteria when evaluating new IT software. Modern security solutions are likewise highly regarded, and GoTo places security at the top of

its list of priorities both internally and externally. It is acclaimed for outperforming its competitors in terms of dependability and stability, and it offers performance, with almost 100% uptime, 24/7 dedicated support, and a pioneering Zero Trust design. Without zero trust, malicious actors may employ such technologies to infiltrate client devices with malware, acting under the assumption that everything within is reliable. That cannot occur with zero trust-based support software as they require systems to validate requests before granting access to any information, which is why zero trust is a key component of GoTo Resolve, our comprehensive all-in-one IT support and management platform that combines all the best parts of real-time support with ticketing tool, together with remote monitoring and endpoint

What

is your growth expectation for this year?

With the Indian market rising as one of the most important destinations for SaaS-based technology, hybrid work models, and customer support organizations, we intend to penetrate the sector both at the corporate and product levels. To co-create resilient IT support technologies for companies of all sizes, GoTo is already collaborating with several channel partners and GSIs. Our solutions are especially important for enterprises focusing on the BFSI, ITES, BPO/OIT, Higher Education, and Healthcare sectors, to better serve and connect their employees and customers securely.

In order to increase the accessibility of our solutions to customers and to guarantee a geographical strategy that works for partners in various regions, we are eager to collaborate with additional partners as we continue to expand the partner ecosystem.

What are the important areas of concern that technology leaders or IT decision-makers should look into when choosing an IT solution management system?

According to a report by NASSCOM and McKinsey, India’s technological services can achieve $300-350 billion in annual revenue by 2025 if it can exploit the fast-emerging business potential in the cloud. The adoption of a cloud-based platform, which can build effective IT teams, boost worker efficiency, and address the issues of the new era head-on, is the current paradigm that IT executives must embrace. IT directors should strive to stay ahead of security issues and make sure their budget allows for any additional management or security expenditures associated with SaaS. Typical priorities of today’s IT leaders are no longer just about efficiency and ease. IT needs to drive business growth and cut costs, all while constantly hunting for innovative technologies. Enterprises should deploy solutions that secure all remote working endpoints, respond promptly to and mitigate difficulties and employ a platform that makes cybersecurity operations simple and easy to use, like zero trust and multifactor authentication (MFA). Lack of skills and reskilling, tech apprehension, and limited funds have created a demand for an effective IT strategy that can manage and scale business operations and people in it. In other words, businesses must be able to accomplish more digitalization work with fewer resources, which is where products like GoTo Resolve will play a key role.

“According to the findings of our State of Work Life poll with Frost & Sullivan, 43% of businesses believe that the impact of the hybrid or remote work model has made IT administration more challenging.”

DRUVA’S DATA PROTECTION PREDICTIONS FOR 2023

For many, 2022 was a year in which hope met uncertainty because the pandemic slowed, but economic and global challenges expanded. In IT, cyber threats continued to be top of mind as organizations sought to reduce their risk of data loss on smaller budgets.

In 2023, we expect the conversation to expand from “security” to “risk” as businesses balance data security, cost, and complexity.

THE 7 DATA PROTECTION PREDICTIONS FOR 2023 BY DRUVA BELOW:

DATA RESILIENCE IN THE SPOTLIGHT

1. Data Protection Integrates with Data Security

Customers need data protection vendors to integrate into their data security ecosystem. Organizations looking to “tighten the belt” on their IT budgets will not have the capital to invest in multiple siloed products and will seek out solutions that bridge the gap between security posture, recovery, management, analytics, and integration with third-party tools.

Additionally, cybercriminals will target cloud workloads as data centers become more secure. Companies will be forced to extend their cyber resilience beyond the data center. With these additional requirements, the market will need to help customers do more with less—less money, less staff, and less experience. There will be a need for autonomous data resilience, in which the customers’ data is automatically secured and protected.

2. MFA, Zero-Trust, and Potential Exploits

People have talked about a multi-factor authentication (MFA) and zero-trust security for several years now, but as we return to offices in 2023, IT teams must reassess the organizational perimeter with a stronger focus on identity. In recent attacks, we have seen examples of sophisticated social engineering taking advantage of MFA fatigue. IT teams must ensure their organizations are thinking ahead of these disasters and implementing stronger systems to account for potential human error.

3. Mergers and Acquisitions Complicate Data Protection

With mergers and acquisitions, companies pick up even more tools and data locations. While executives talk about unifying back-end infrastructure, data and application gravity make standardization incredibly difficult. Instead, IT needs to find a way to protect and secure data where it lives, without hiring more people or buying more tools.

BUDGETARY CONCERNS IN AN UNCERTAIN ECONOMY

4. Economic Challenges Shrink the Time Horizon for Technology Investment Companies will leverage the cloud for most new initiatives because they will want to make low-risk bets in 2023. Cloud-based projects require a minimal initial investment, charge only for what is consumed, and can be quickly decommissioned.

Additionally, teams will ruthlessly prioritize IT projects based on rapid ROI (return on investment). Because they do not have enough senior personnel, and the economy is a concern, they will need to show value in six months to propel

them to the next investment.

5. Automation to Reduce the Skills Gap Time and again, it’s been proven that humans are the weakest link in the security chain. To ensure data resilience in the wake of a disaster or cyberattack, security leaders will need to prioritize the proper training of their staff while equipping them with the right systems to automate processes.

THE AI/ML REVOLUTION COMES TO DATA PROTECTION

6. AI/ML Automation Saves Cost and Human

Effort

Organizations have struggled to scale their AI/ ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning) model deployment in production due to complex data dependencies, manual processes, lack of expert AI/ML skills, and siloed engineering teams. In 2023, organizations will look to invest in AI/ML platform teams and services that can simplify dependencies, improve data and model discoverability, manage dataset access and governance, and make model building and deployment easily repeatable. MLOps (machine learning operations) platforms that provide these benefits will gain traction.

7. Autonomous Data Protection Is the Future The status quo in data protection has been unrealistic, with businesses expecting to have dedicated teams to manage backups, SLAs, RPOs, and RTOs, and diligently troubleshoot failures. In reality, workloads have grown more complex, data growth has been massive, and there are hundreds of enterprise applications used in an organization, requiring backup administrators to spend significant time and effort on data protection tasks.

In IT, cyber threats continued to be top of mind as organizations sought to reduce their risk of data loss on smaller budgets

EXPOSURE MANAGEMENT WILL BE CRUCIAL FOR CYBERSECURITY IN 2023

As businesses adopt emerging technologies to grow, the attack surface constantly expands. A holistic view of all cyber exposures is critical to secure dynamic IT environments

point tools. With Tenable One, organizations have a full view of their attack surface, so they can prioritize which areas

to be secured first.”

As a company – how has Tenable performed in 2022 in the Indian Customer Industry?

Tenable has brought new technologies to market through innovation and acquisitions to help customers in India and around the world to not only assess vulnerabilities but discover problems in their Active Directory, cloud, control systems and OT, and other parts of their IT environment.

We recognize that today’s organizations are operating on distributed, hybrid networks that stretch across many data centres in multiple geolocations, cloud-based infrastructures, applications, virtualized platforms and services and much more. There are more types of technologies, assets and services in every organization and each and every one of them is vulnerable to some sort of attack or threat beyond a simple, exploitable vulnerability caused by a missing patch.

It is for this reason that we recently launched Tenable One an Exposure Management Platform to help organizations holistically look at the entire attack surface and operationalizes preventive security practices.

What are the major cyber security technologies opportunities you have participated in while coming to solving challenges in the user market?

As the attack surface gets more complex and dynamic, securing IT environments requires a holistic view of all areas of exposure. We launched Tenable One to help organizations fully understand the breadth and depth of their exposures. With a unified solution, we are able to help organizations address vulnerability management, web application security, cloud security, identity security, attack path analysis and external attack surface management.

From a global perspective, Tenable’s customers include over 50% of Fortune 500, more than 30% of the Global Fortune 2000 companies and large governmental agencies. Organizations in the financial, education, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, telecommunications, government, and public sectors rely on Tenable’s Exposure Management platform to gain visibility into their entire attack surface, and holistically assess, manage and measure cyber exposure.

What are other milestones you have achieved last year?

At Tenable, insights from our customers inform decisions we make and these insights have led us to envision a future where vulnerability

management and preventative cybersecurity tools need to come together to shift the current security paradigm. And this was what led us to launch TenableOne in 2022.

We are able to help organizations eliminate data silos created by using point tools. With Tenable One, organizations have a full view of their attack surface, so they can prioritize which areas need to be secured first. Tenable also achieved Application Security distinction in the AWS Security Competency for our cloud-native vulnerability management solution. With Tenable’s acquisition of Bit Discovery in 2022, we launched an attack surface management solution this year — Tenable.asm. With attack path analysis and external attack surface management, organizations can gain a comprehensive understanding of the attack surface by seeing what an attacker sees and knowing what to prioritize.

What is your road map for 2023?

A lot of the industry operates in silos. We will continue to change that mindset. Tenable One is an aggressive step forward, we’re helping people look across their entire landscape where are weaknesses or combination of weaknesses and allow you the figure out the most efficient way to break those paths and reduce risk.

KARTIK SHAHANI, COUNTRY MANAGER, TENABLE INDIA

Which industries have adopted your technologies?

“We are able to help organizations eliminate data silos created by using

need

BY SANJAY @ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

We live in a world of data. Many aspects of our lives depend on it. Yet, many people are challenged by data literacy, unable to decipher the meaning hidden in plain sight. Meanwhile, machine automation is advancing at a rapid pace, so too is the public mistrust in AI and algorithmic decision-making. Humans and machines each make their own mistakes, but together they complement each other’s strengths. It’s time we rethink our approach to human vs machines to achieve the best of both worlds. Let’s look at a few scenarios.

In 2005 an 80-year-old man checked himself into the urgent care clinic of a big city hospital. We’ll call him Peter (although that was not his real name). He had a fever and a serious cough, but the doctors were optimistic that his pneumonia was manageable. The staff took him up to a ward to be given intravenous antibiotics.

At the same time, just a few curtains down the same corridor, another patient arrived. This man, a diabetic, had a nasty skin infection and he too needed to be admitted. The doctor ordered a fingerstick test to check his glucose levels and he was sent up to a ward.

In the confusion of a busy walk-in center full of people needing attention, a duplicate of Peter’s barcoded wristband ended up on the diabetic man’s wrist. So, when his glucose results were ready, they were automatically (and erroneously) uploaded to Peter’s electronic medical notes.

Meanwhile, over on the other ward where the real Peter lay, an Intern doctor noticed his gigantically high blood sugar reading. She began to write up an equally gigantic order of 10 units of insulin – the correct thing to do, based on the test result. Little did she know that in Peter’s perfectly normal, non-diabetic bloodstream, that would have been enough to drop him into a coma, and would almost certainly become fatal.

But something gave the Resident doctor pause. Peter wasn’t down as a diabetic, he had no symptoms of diabetes, and there was no reason for him to have suddenly become hypoglycemic. Knowing the magnitude of the decision to administer the drugs, she re-ran the test, and saved Peter’s life in the process. Humans making the final decision was essential to a good outcome in this case.

Page Break

Automation, when used naively and combined with non-validated data, can have the pernicious effect of weakening human vigilance. But human

THE HUMAN TOUCH QLIK

Machine automation is advancing at a rapid pace, so too is the public mistrust in AI and algorithmic decision-making

instincts also have a habit of letting us down. Half a century earlier, a young Danny Kahneman was charged by the Israeli army to decide which new recruits would become successful military commanders. He set about observing them while they performed a difficult group activity – using a plank of wood to get everyone over a wall without

touching it – watching to see who showed natural signs of leadership. With Kahneman convinced that he had done an excellent job of assessing their abilities, the recruits were sent off to perform their roles as fighter pilots, armored units, and infantry soldiers.

But then Kahneman decided he should validate

his predictions. Checking back to see how the ‘stars’ had performed in officer training, he found they had often been woefully disappointing. Meanwhile, some of the recruits he had labelled as inadequate went on to excel. His assessments, based on all the nuance and experience of human judgement, had proved to be totally worthless.

Kahneman subsequently tried to come up with an objective way to measure the characteristics he thought might be relevant for military success. He wrote a list of the things he thought should be important – pride, sense of duty, capacity for independent thought and so on – and devised a questionnaire to quantify each characteristic. It was a sincere attempt to strip away the psychological biases in human decision-making, and in doing so he hit upon a system that actually worked, one that is still used by the Israeli army today.

All the evidence in the intervening decades backs up Kahneman’s findings: humans are a mess of indecision, bias, presuppositions, mood,

stress, fatigue, and mistakes. An automated process might not be perfect, but letting people have a final say will likely lead to more errors, not less. In a world where we struggle to understand data effectively, combining human and machine capabilities can create a sharper focus to how we view the world around us and clearly see the opportunities it presents to us.

Combining human and machine capabilities can create a sharper focus to how we view the world around us.

So how do you square the two? How do you choose between humans, who excel at their understanding of context and nuance but cannot make consistent decisions, and automated processes, which are far better at being objective but don’t understand the decisions they’re making?

The answer comes in recognizing that, while humans and machines are flawed, they are flawed in different ways. When it comes to combining them, you could start, naively, by thinking about the technology

to fill in the gaps of what the system can’t yet do. Or (better) you can do things the other way around.

The contrast between the technology-first and human-first approaches is well illustrated by the development of driverless cars in the last few years. Humans aren’t very good at paying attention for long periods of time, and driverless cars with human monitors have struggled to live up to their early promise. Meanwhile, collision avoidance systems – which largely use much of the same technology – are a good example of building a system around the human, allowing the driver to remain alert and in control, but stepping in as an emergency backup when the driver has missed something or fails to react under pressure.

A partnership can go further, by freeing up the cognitive load on the human while still allowing them to sense check the results and take context and nuance into account. Think of sat nav systems that offer users three options to choose from, thus reducing the risk of a system directing people to drive off cliffs or out into the ocean (both of which really happened with earlier systems).

We live in a world where data is relevant to everything and is everywhere.

We live in a world where data is relevant to everything and is everywhere. Looking at how we use it, how we work with data to drive action and positive change is a great place to start. This is the version of the approach to automation that I’m hoping to see more of going forward:

1. Be clear on the outcome you want (e.g., forecast accuracy)

2. List the relevant activities that humans are bad at (e.g., consistency)

3. List the relevant activities that machines are bad at (e.g., nuance)

4. Look to automate the parts of the process where machines outperform humans

5. Think hard about the possible ways things could go wrong

6. Validate performance against your objective

7. Iterate

The time for the rhetoric of humans vs machines has passed. Instead, we need to move toward a future where we focus on exploiting each other’s strengths and embracing each other’s weaknesses, and aim to create better partnerships between humans and machines.

first, and expect human operators

“Automation, when used naively and combined with non-validated data, can have the pernicious effect of weakening human vigilance. But human instincts also have a habit of letting us down.”

VARUN BABBAR MD (INDIA & SAARC), QLIK

BY AMBIKA @ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

TREND MICRO

UNIFIED APPROACH: THE WAY FORWARD FOR CYBERSECURITY

Cybersecurity education, building a resilient cybersecurity workforce, having a strong risk management strategy in place for an organization’s digital attack surface is of utmost importance

Why unified cybersecurity is gaining popularity in the current evolving threat landscape?

As organisations and security teams struggle to manage the increasing complexity introduced by digital transformation, data privacy, and more, the need for a unified cybersecurity platform has never been more crucial. A unified cybersecurity platform enables businesses to understand, communicate, and mitigate cyber risk across the enterprise. SecOps teams can use the platform to continuously discover their ever-changing attack surface, understand and prioritise vulnerabilities, rapidly detect and respond to threats, and apply the right security at the right time to mitigate risk. Moreover, built-in security capabilities like XDR, risk insights, threat assessment, and more, help the security operations team be more effective with fewer resources.

What are some of the key competitive advantages of unified cybersecurity offering by Trend Micro?

Trend Micro’s unique offering, “Trend Micro One,” is an ecosystem of native & third-party integrations that delivers deep activity data across email, endpoints, servers, cloud workloads, and networks to provide visibility & control across the entire attack surface. It offers multiple benefits to businesses, such as the ability to understand, communicate, and mitigate risks entirely. The threat mitigation is supported by unparalleled threat and vulnerability insights from our global

research team and the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative, our vulnerability disclosure program. This not only helps in enhancing cyber resilience by continuously discovering the attack surface, but also prioritizes vulnerabilities, which then helps in faster mitigation of real threats. Trend Micro One simplifies security operations and eliminates the blind spots by deploying a central visibility and analysis of your risk posture across your entire environment, including risk indicators and insights from third-party ecosystem solutions.

The platform aids in lowering the impact on security teams, enabling them to be more effective with fewer resources through automation, prioritised alerts and insights, and augmenting security teams with expert services like Managed XDR, threat assessment, and incident response.

Furthermore, the platform enables vendor consolidation and business agility by delivering multiple market-leading capabilities for protecting cloud, endpoint, email, network, and IoT environments. This also includes detection and response for cyber insurance requirements.

What according to you are some of the key cybersecurity challenges organizations are facing in 2022 and what should they learn from it?

The rise of ransomware attacks has been one of the most significant and pressing problems for security teams this year. The ransomware threat landscape has continued to evolve with new players and lucrative monetization methods. We

are also seeing increase in Identity compromise thereby leading to a cyber breach. Moreover, attackers continue to target both public and private sectors.

There was also an increase in cloud-based attacks this year. On one hand, where the adoption of the cloud has reduced operational cost and increased efficiency, it has also opened the gates to data security breaches; lack of encryption, authentication, and improper configuration of the cloud setups are some of the key reasons for compromised data security.

Disconnected security layers and siloed tools also led to an increase in false positives that in turn stemmed up another challenge of false negatives - legitimate threats sneaking under the radar. Lastly, another prominent challenge that the industry is facing right now is talent crunch. A recent report by World Economic Forum states that the world currently lacks 3 million cybersecurity professionals. The cybersecurity industry is no stranger to skills shortage.

The learning that carves out of these challenges is this: Businesses need to protect their workers by instituting access control policies, even if they work remotely. When it comes to defending against phishing scams, cybersecurity education and knowledge are key. Lastly, along with building a resilient cybersecurity workforce, having a strong risk management strategy in place for an organization’s digital attack surface is of utmost essence. A unified cybersecurity platform will help with managing the entire lifecycle of the digital attack surface.

What are the differentiators that Trend Micro bring to this market? The key differentiator that we bring to this market is our unified cybersecurity platform that enables vendor consolidation with multiple market-leading security capabilities and deep integration with the IT environment. Through our products and services, we ensure ease of deployment, ease of licensing & bundled services. Our unified platform provides a centralized view of the organization’s attack surface and risk index that enables them to prioritise the remediation measure thereby helping security leaders drastically reduce threat investigation & response time from months to few hours.

Can you elaborate on two of the biggest highlights at Trend Micro over the last six months?

Over the last six months, we’ve successfully

SHARDA TICKOO TECHNICAL DIRECTOR, TREND MICRO

discovered and mitigated over 94 billion threats by leveraging over 250 million global sensors to deliver better insights and stop threats faster. We have also helped protect over five lakh organisations around the world who trust us for their various security requirements. Moreover, we have

deployed multiple regional data centers around the world, enabling our customers to address both cybersecurity and data privacy requirements, which helped us in managing over 5 trillion threat queries.

In August, we celebrated our continued

leadership in the fast-growing global market for cloud security, as per the latest IDC market share report on Cloud Workload Security. We also successfully organised our Annual Partners Day in June 2022 wherein our focus was to further empower our partners and strengthen our channel partner ecosystem in India. During the three-day event, we elaborated on various ways to support our partners in their transformational journeys and shared insights on the latest trends in cybersecurity.

Can you elaborate on your market approach?

We are a 100% partner driven organization. Post the pandemic, there was a major change: customers tend to prefer a Pay As You Go Model as compared to multi-year contracts. We have shifted to a SaaS model, which means all of our solutions can be delivered on the cloud, so we are well adjusted with this change. We are also aware that certain regulated sectors may still need an on-premise approach and hence we have a hybrid strategy going on for certain segments. Our major focus is also on creating a unified cybersecurity platform so that our customers get a centralized view of their organization’s digital attack surface, helping them reduce their response time from months to few hours.

How Trend Micro’s unified cybersecurity platform protects organizations across clouds, networks, devices, and endpoints?

Trend Micro’s unified cybersecurity platform, Trend Micro One, protects organizations across the endpoints by increasing visibility across their dynamic attack surface, assessing and prioritising risks, identifying identity based threats, mapping it with industry standards like MITRE framework which helps in responding with the right security at the right time. Trend Micro Sensors deployed across endpoint, network, email and cloud also take remediation actions basis the visibility provided by the platform. It is a holistic cybersecurity platform that ensures no loopholes exists in any defensive measures. The platform enables vendor consolidation with multiple marketleading security capabilities and deep integration with your IT environment, simplifying security and helping you detect and stop breaches faster. It also provides risk and posture visibility for Zero trust Initiatives through continual monitoring, enabling more resilience against risks and automation of risk-based decisions.

““Trend Micro One,” is an ecosystem of native & third-party integrations that delivers deep activity data across email, endpoints, servers, cloud workloads, and networks to provide visibility & control across the entire attack surface.”

NEO4J SEES STRONG GROWTH IN 2022 WITH GRAPH TECHNOLOGIES RECEIVING INCREASING INTEREST FROM TOP IT DECISION MAKERS

Fraud detection, gaming and supply chain management are some key areas where they are witnessing a lot of traction.

As a company – how has Neo4j performed in 2022 in the Indian Customer Industry?

Neo4j has seen a very strong growth in India across verticals - especially in manufacturing, gaming and BFSI - by bringing on board some of the biggest names in the sectors. Additionally, we’ve managed to forge stronger ties with our OEM customers, who have further integrated Neo4j’s graph technology into their products.

Going into specifics, we have also demonstrated strong use cases like our latest offering of digital twins for manufacturing companies and fraud detection for gaming companies. We’ve also worked back with companies for their supply chain optimization using digital twins.

Over the course of 2022, we’ve also worked back with governments through the adoption and application of Neo4j’s graph technology. This can be a game changer for them since our graph technology allows for increased efficiency while also being easily scalable. Additionally, there has also been interest from other sectors including financial services, travel, retail, and healthcare, that have a strong desire to explore the adoption of graph technologies to solve complex problems plaguing their industries.

Customers seeking solutions to complex problems affecting their operations, innovations, and bottom line have driven our business’s growth not only in India but in the entire Asia Pacific region. We are the category creators in this space, and

currently lead the entire graph platform category. By being the first to market, we have a significant advantage in terms of more mature technology as well as our increasingly evolving customer base.

What are the major technologies opportunities you have participated in while coming to solving challenges in the user market?

Discovering, capturing, and making sense of complex interdependencies is central to running a business in the digital age. Whether it’s optimizing a network or an application infrastructure, managing change, or providing solutions - these problems frequently involve a complex set of physical and human interdependencies that can be difficult to manage. An organization must harness the power to effectively manage all these changing factors. Graph databases, as opposed to relational databases, are designed to store interconnected data that is not purely hierarchical, making it easier than ever to understand networked data.

At Neo4j, we help customers in solving challenges like fraud detection, monitoring for IT operations, product recommendation, master data management, social media and social network graphs, identity, and access management, data privacy, supply chain management among many other things. We have seen increased awareness about our business and company and now organizations are curious to learn what more

can be done with Neo4j and the potential that it can have. Over the year, we saw graphs being used to optimize networks, provide personalization and ease manufacturing operations and in the coming year we wish to explore more of these and also discover opportunities with our cloud hyper-scalers.

Graph techniques are also being utilized to drive digital transformation in the enterprise, improving data management and decision-making. Neo4j was the first and is the most comprehensive graph data platform in the graph market. We’re dedicated to bringing graph technology into the mainstream by connecting the community, customers, partners, and even competitors as they adopt graph best practices globally.

Which industries have adopted your technologies?

Our technology has been adopted by industries such as insurance, banking, aircraft manufacturers, retailers, automakers, telecom, healthcare, travel, financial services, startups, and education. By allowing businesses to make decisions based on relationships and connections, graph databases enable disruptive innovation. Neo4j is trusted for its performance, reliability, and scalability by a growing number of people all over the world who use it to address a wide range of problems.

Easy accessibility has been a key driver of our adoption. For instance, our community edition, Aura free, is a free version that small businesses and start-ups can use for small development projects, learning, experimenting, and prototyping. We also have Aura professional which can be used by mid-tier businesses looking to get started with Neo4j and explore its offerings. It is beneficial for medium-sized applications in advanced development or production environments. AuraDB professional is used for largescale, mission-critical applications that require advanced security and 24x7 support.

There is also Neo4j Graph Data Science, which is a comprehensive graph analytics workspace built for data scientists with new and enhanced capabilities. Also, AuraDS, a fully managed cloud service, is available. We recently announced a new feature - Neo4j 5 - which extends native graphs’ performance lead over traditional databases. It makes scaling out and scaling up easier across any deployment, whether on-premise, in the cloud, a hybrid setup, or a multi-cloud model. These varied offerings make our offering not only lucrative, but also economical. This has therefore drawn interest from across industries, this seeing very quick adoption of Neo4j’s graph technology.

We launched Graph Data Science as a service in April, our comprehensive graph analytics workspace with new and enhanced capabilities built for data scientists, which is also available as a fully managed cloud service.

We hosted India’s first ever GraphSummit in Bangalore with over 450 attendees including technology leaders, key decision makers, technical professionals, CIOs, and graph data science experts. We also hosted multiple community events to touch base with our growing community in India. This is on the back of an increasing interest that they have expressed for our platform. In fact, users of our community edition increased multifold in 2022.

Recently, we also announced the general availability of Neo4j 5, the next-generation cloudready graph database. Neo4j 5 provides easier scale-out and scale-up across any deployment, whether on-premises, in the cloud, hybrid, or multi cloud. The result empowers organizations to create and deploy intelligent applications at large scale and discover greater value from their data.

We also announced the 2022 Neo4j Connected Data Fellowship in partnership with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The fellowship is inspired by how graph databases strengthen reporting and help journalists understand large datasets.

All in all, we have seen increasing engagement with our community, partners and customers and we shall continue to raise the bar for advanced analytics and the value that it can add to businesses.

What is your road map for 2023?

RAHUL TENGLIKAR REGIONAL DIRECTOR, INDIA AT NEO4J

What are other milestones you have achieved last year? - customer meets, any hires, new offices, marquee customers etc?

2022 has been a significant year for us in many aspects. We saw accelerated demand from across industries with organizations seeking to solve the most complex problems using advanced analytics.

Neo4j has always been true to its open-source roots. We hold our community, of over a quarter million developers, at the core of all our plans and strategies. When we raised funds in 2021, our plan was to direct it towards global expansion with special focus on India. Consequently, India has become one of the largest communities for us. In fact, the Asia- Pacific region entirely has been a major growth area, with our business almost doubling up over time.

Going forward, we expect this momentum to continue. There is still a lot of potential for graphs that is yet to be unlocked. While graphs today are being used for multiple use cases across sectors, there are still many more yet to be explored. Developers are still discovering these gradually and realizing the value that graphs can add to their business. This curiosity and increasing interest towards graphs will help Neo4j scale faster. We also hope to continue on our hiring plans in line with this expected growth trajectory.

“Over the year, we saw graphs being used to optimize networks, provide personalization and ease manufacturing operations and in the coming year we wish to explore more of these and also discover opportunities with our cloud hyper-scalers.”

BY AMBIKA @ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

ACCELERATE BUSINESS RESILIENCY IN THE AGE OF CYBER MALADIES

With the increasing global instability and overall digital maturity, cyber-attacks are also evolving and becoming more intelligent with their approach. Proactive cyber resilience requires a 360-degree approach to enable business acceleration by preparing for, protecting against, and recovering from cyber threats

How was the year 2022 for Micro Focus in India?

2022 has witnessed continued traction for digital adoption from all sectors mainly the public sector, smart cities, and BFSI. Micro Focus has collaborated with the central and state governments in India on several smart city projects to digitize citizen services and infrastructure management services. We work majorly on most of the smart city projects in India. We are also present in largescale transformational Digital India projects such as BharatNet and data centers throughout the country which help facilitate and improve Citizen Services under various programs.

Additionally, we have also seen an increased amount of traction with GIC’s for our application testing and cybersecurity solutions. We have been instrumental in enabling several customers in public sectors, BFSI, GIC and manufacturing segment test and scale seamlessly with our performance and application testing as well as application lifecycle management offerings while also helping them consolidate multi-cloud and on-premises operations, speeds up provisioning, and achieve management consistency with our IT Operations Management (ITOM) offerings, in particular the HCMX offering which fosters a culture of financial responsibility. Improves decision-making with intelligent insights. Our new offering Value Edge is a SaaS platform for pulling maximum value through a digital value stream (DVS) with maximum efficiency, visibility, and agility. We are also seeing an increased adoption of cloud-based cybersecurity solutions across verticals therefore increasing the demand of our Enterprise Security Manager tool ArcSight. While doing this our Application Modernization offer-

ings have helped the BFSI segment in driving the modernization efforts for legacy applications by bridging them with modern technology creating new value from IT investments.

We are also focused on our existing customers introducing new ways to work and supporting them throughout the pandemic. Our broad portfolio of enterprise software products and services has had a great run and has enabled enterprises to accelerate, simplify, strengthen, and analyze their core operations. The present year has been instrumental in many aspects. In the digitally advanced era, organizations need to move fast without disrupting business continuity. DevOps, cloud-native design, open-source tooling, and microservices have pushed software development and delivery forward. The rapid technology adoption led to focus shifts to leverage emerging technologies like AI/ML and cloud solutions. Digital acceleration has provided opportunities for business to re-align their operating frameworks to the changing landscape.

There was massive adoption of cloud computing and at the same time cyber security breaches what was the play of Micro Focus?

With the increasing global instability and overall digital maturity, cyber-attacks are also evolving and becoming more intelligent with their approach. According to Forrester, Australia, India, and Japan are the most cyber-attacked nations in Asia, overtaking North America and Europe. Malware and insider threats remain the key form of cyberattack in India making third-party security extremely crucial. This will increase technology demands and the need for tools for

risk assessment, supply chain mapping, real-time monitoring, and ensuring business continuity. Forrester reveals that 55% of SOCs report their organizations have experienced threats involving third parties or supply chains over the last year.

Proactive cyber resilience requires a 360-degree approach to enable business acceleration by preparing for, protecting against, and recovering from cyber threats by detecting the changing risk surface and evolving the capability to address the same. Proactive cyber resilience helps businesses thrive and stay relevant even during adverse situations.

CyberRes by Micro Focus has Galaxy, a platform designed to help CISOs, help accelerate trust, reliability, and survivability during times of adverse conditions, crisis, and business volatility.

What were the market challenges for you this year?

The pandemic underlines a learning curve for every business particularly the importance of building a resilient workforce. The new reality that technology leaders stand before is the adoption of a cloud-based platform that can create efficient IT teams, contribute to workforce productivity, and resolves the new-age challenges head-on. IDC predicts that by 2024, over 50% of enterprises will switch traditional operational models with cloudcentric models for superior business outcomes. organizations. As we move forward in the digital world, IT teams are now more focused on the adoption of Cloud Native Platforms (CNPs) to reinforce their hybrid infrastructure. The industry realized the need for applications to be hardened and fortified before being deployed in the cloud. DevSecOps for example became more crucial as CIOs have prioritized ensuring security and eliminating risks during the application development process. To suit the demands of the evolving digital landscape, automation in DevSecOps has over time eliminated coding oversights and data breaches. Though the aftermath of the pandemic left us reeling from a country wide economic downtime, the industry today has been able to get a head start on what exactly is required and striving for it in the most cost-effective manner.

How do you want to close this year?

The pandemic working habits have accelerated digital transformation and customers’ need for niche technologies has also increased exponentially. For helping businesses embrace this digital infrastructure, partners would play a pivotal role in providing the right solutions and products to ensure increase in return on investment for the customers. As a channelfocused enterprise, Micro Focus continues to work towards expanding the partner ecosystem

through various initiatives and programs. There would be an increased collaboration with our channel community to provide end to end solutions to customers relevant to their domains. With a focus on safeguarding existing revenue models and achieving new business goals, we

strive to deploy solutions to address every issue of our customers and deliver a highly differentiated value proposition.

Micro Focus plans to continue to invest in building the digital and cyber resilience capabilities of our consumers and partners. We have

recently introduced Micro Focus Partner Boost Program specifically in the APJ region to make collaboration with Micro Focus easier with high profitability in India.

SAURABH SAXENA COUNTRY DIRECTOR – INDIA, MICRO FOCUS

“As a channel-focused enterprise, Micro Focus continues to work towards expanding the partner ecosystem through various initiatives and programs.”

TWO KEY MARKET AND INDUSTRY TRENDS, CONVERGENCE AND CONSOLIDATION, ARE KEY DRIVERS OF FORTINET’S GROWTH

As 2022 comes to a close, Vishak Raman, Vice President of Sales, India, SAARC and Southeast Asia at Fortinet shares the company’s future growth will be driven by the convergence of networking and security, the industry trend of vendor and product consolidation, the elevated threat environment, and a greater focus on offering services for existing and new customers

As a company – how Fortinet has performed in 2022 in Indian Customer Industry?

Fortinet in India according to Frost & Sullivan Network Security Market Q1 2022 report was the leading vendor in terms of Market Share by revenue and had a very high growth of 56.9 percent when compared to its market share in Q1 2021. Globally Fortinet’s recent quarterly results for Q3 2022 saw revenue for the quarter grow by 33%, significantly outpacing the industry growth rate. Product revenue growth was very strong at 39%, extending our position as a product revenue leader in the cybersecurity industry. Our product revenue performance reflects the strong demand we’ve built over the past 18 months across our security solutions along with the successful execution of our teams in managing the supply chain. In the quarter, SD-WAN and OT bookings grew over 45% and 75%, respectively, and together accounted for over 25% of total bookings. We believe we can achieve #1 market share in SD-WAN in the next couple of years.

What are the major cyber security technologies opportunities, you have participated while coming to solving challenges in the user market?

Two key market and industry trends, convergence and consolidation, are key drivers of Fortinet’s growth. Also, our broad portfolio of security

and networking solutions and our ability to run traditionally isolated technologies as a single, integrated cybersecurity platform uniquely position us to address these trends. We also continue to see large enterprises favour Fortinet’s industryleading cost/performance advantage enabled by our SPU (ASIC innovation). In addition, we remain focused on securing our customers’ entire infrastructure from the data center to the cloud. This ensures that every transaction is secured end-to-end and empowers organizations to build the networks they need to remain competitive without concerns about performance or protection.

Traditional network and security architectures, especially rigid systems hidden behind a permanent perimeter, no longer work for today’s digital business. The explosion of edge and cloud computing, combined with the rapid transition to work-from-anywhere, requires a hybrid approach that converges networking and security. This enables the agility that today’s organizations require.

Fortinet is at the forefront of networking and security convergence, empowering our customers to reduce complexity while maintaining superior performance. Making this happen requires the consolidation of vendors and technologies. Organizations don’t just need fewer vendors to manage but also the consolidation of product functionality. The most effective approach is

consolidating point products into a unified cybersecurity platform. Fortinet’s innovation strategy, led by our in-house engineering and development teams allows us to maximize this trend towards convergence and consolidation for our customers and partners. For example, the Fortinet Security Fabric mesh platform is designed to provide consistent security for organizations, delivering broad, integrated, and automated protection across multiple edges, from endpoints to data centers and across hybrid cloud environments.

Which industries have adopted your technologies?

As OT leaders increase digital connectivity between their IT and OT network infrastructures, they face an increase in potential security risks. In fact, a recent Fortinet survey showed that 93% of OT organizations experienced an intrusion in the past 12 months. That’s because OT and critical infrastructure have become key targets for cybercriminals, especially as OT networks are increasingly exposed. Several high-profile attacks targeting critical infrastructure have made headlines around the world. Similar to other sectors, ransomware attacks against OT are also increasing.

For more than a decade, Fortinet has protected OT environments in critical infrastructure sectors such as energy, defense, manufacturing, food, and transportation. By designing security into complex infrastructure via the Fortinet Security Fabric, organizations have an efficient, non-disruptive way to ensure that their OT environment is protected and compliant. With full integration and shared threat intelligence, industrial organizations gain fast, automated responses to attacks in any vector. Fortinet’s Security Fabric covers the entire converged IT-OT network to close OT security gaps, deliver full visibility and provide simplified management.

How many net new customers have you added this year? Who are the major names?

The Fortinet Security Fabric platform delivers broad, integrated, and automated protections across the entire digital attack surface, securing critical devices, data, applications, and connections from the data center to the cloud to the home office. Ranking #1 in the most security appliances shipped worldwide, more than 615,000 customers trust Fortinet to protect their businesses. In India Fortinet secures leading UPI Transaction companies, Eight of top ten Public Sector and Private Banks, Eight of the top ten Pharmaceutical Companies, Seven of the top ten Information Technology companies and Five of the top ten unicorns.

We recently announced the launch of FortiGate 1000F to help customers achieve their sustainability goals by requiring 83 percent fewer watts per Gbps of firewall throughput and requiring 86 percent fewer watts per Gbps of IPsec VPN throughput. FortiGate 1000F also requires less cooling than other solutions, generating only 15 percent of the BTU/h per Gbps of firewall throughput compared to competitive firewalls.

Fortinet’s high-performance, low-power network firewalls mean that enterprises require fewer firewalls to accomplish their business needs, helping further reduce costs for space and cooling in the data center.

What is your road map for 2023?

Fortinet’s future growth will be driven by the convergence of networking and security, the industry trend of vendor and product consolidation, the elevated threat environment, and a greater focus on offering services for existing and new customers. In addition, customer recognition of the value provided by our high performance FortiASIC technology and integrated FortiOS operating system is driving our ability to take a big pie out of the cybersecurity market share. For example, Fortinet continues to gain Secure SD-WAN market share as our Secure SD-WAN solution delivers better security, performance and efficiencies over more traditional offerings.

VISHAK RAMAN VICE PRESIDENT OF SALES INDIA, SAARC AND SOUTHEAST ASIA AT FORTINET

Fortinet was honoured to once again be recognized with Gartner Peer Insights Customer’s Choice 2022 award for Network Firewall. Based on peer-sourced reviews, customers of all sizes and industries have recognized Fortinet for enabling them to optimize their digital acceleration efforts by delivering on the features and performance they need to be successful – all delivered by the same FortiGate solution, running on the same FortiOS operating system, and managed through the same console. It’s why we believe that the FortiGate Network Firewall also received the Gartner Peer Insights Customer’s Choice recognition for WAN Edge Infrastructure for the third year in a row.

What are other milestones you have

achieved last year?

At Fortinet, we understand the importance of making sustainability integral to our business model. 2021 was the year for defining our strategy and planning the company’s journey for the medium- to long-term. We came out with our inaugural sustainability report this year, we aim to increase transparency on progress to date and allow our stakeholders – including customers, partners, employees, suppliers, shareholders, and communities – to better understand our corporate social responsibility approach, leading with ambition towards a more sustainable world and safer internet.

We estimate the total addressable market for networking and security will increase from $54 billion today to $73 billion in 2026. Convergence accelerates digital transformation and substantially reduces operational costs by combining network modernization with dynamic security that spans every part of the network, especially now that many companies are merging SOC and NOC operations together. For years Fortinet has led strategies around the convergence of networking and security. In fact, we are leading the convergence trend with a wide range of technologies including Secure SD-WAN, SASE, ZTNA, and others in a single operating system which can be deployed as hardware, software, cloud, and as-a-Service.

For over 20 years, Fortinet has been a driving force in the evolution of cybersecurity and the convergence of networking and security. Our security solutions are the most deployed, most patented, and among the most validated in the industry. Also, our proprietary ASIC technology and our integrated FortiOS, creates a unique advantage allowing us to converge networking functionality and security capabilities as well as consolidate vendors and product functionality across the entire infrastructure.

“Fortinet is at the forefront of networking and security convergence, empowering our customers to reduce complexity while maintaining superior performance.”

TOP TECH PREDICTIONS FOR 2023

As we look ahead to 2023, there are multiple technologies which could impact the industries and our day-to-day lives. In this article, we have Jeff Clarke, Vice Chairman and Co-COO of Dell

Technologies explaining how technology will rise to meet new expectations in this data era

JEFF CLARKE VICE CHAIRMAN AND CO-COO DELL TECHNOLOGIES

BY

2022 has been a rollercoaster. I don’t think any of us could have predicted what was coming. The constant through it all has been the importance of technology to overcome our near-term obstacles and to realize our long-term opportunities.

The technological innovation that drives human progress is accelerating. With hyperconnectivity spanning multiple cloud environments and the edge, we now have data everywhere. Simply put, it’s growing not only in quantity, but in value every day.

At the forefront of this advancement and growth, we will experience new expectations. We will expect technology to make our lives easier, and our businesses more successful. We will expect that technology to help us advance forward in big areas from education to healthcare to government services and beyond. As a result, we will see our essential technologies and their corresponding user experiences rise to meet the challenge.

As we look ahead to 2023, I see four themes

rising to the top of the CIO agenda:

Technology will define the work experience

In the do-anything-from-anywhere economy, the future of work is evolving, and as we design for a hybrid world, technology rather than physical workspace, will increasingly define the employee experience. This is a blue-sky opportunity to design what works best for you, your company and your culture.

“In 2023, we expect accelerating innovation to focus on making the entire technology ecosystem work as a platform for your digital transformation.”

Version one of work-from-anywhere during the early stages of the COVID pandemic was all about the “anywhere” part. We used the mobility of modern clients to take our work, school and life to wherever we needed it. The next phase of this journey is about making the “work” part better. We need the right tools and devices, the right workspaces for collaboration, and the right culture to make work, well, work.

Being a student is different than being a doctor, teacher, engineer or data scientist. We now realize that having the right client capability, form factor and most importantly ecosystem of peripherals creates the complete environment needed to excel. We have seen investments in advanced display technology dramatically improve the effectiveness of developing software remotely. We have also seen better audio and video capability create a dramatic difference in remote learning. A personalized and optimized environment can be a path to real differentiation for users.

As a result, there will be a rising end-user expectation to seamlessly connect people to people, as well as to the data, applications and services they care about. After all, from building culture to driving innovation to serving customers, technology is the fulcrum of progress. So, no matter how organizations approach the future of work, the modern work experience will be defined by technology.

Walled gardens will crumble into tech ecosystem

The global technology industry is massive and growing every day. The good news is that there is no shortage of innovation to address the breadth of business opportunities. The tradeoff is that with each new facet of innovation, organizations are left with sprawl and complexity.

For example, in the early days of cloud, most companies ended up adopting multiple public, private, edge and even telecom clouds to power their business. This “multiple cloud” stage creates huge access to innovation within each cloud but inevitably creates silos and duplication of data. The siloed clouds look like walled gardens.

In 2022, we started to see an industry shift to true “multicloud” architectures. These use the compute services of whatever clouds you embrace but also focus on turning important capabilities ”horizontal” across the multicloud environment. A good example of this is storage and data as a common service all your clouds can access. Multicloud edge capabilities are being launched, and cyber resiliency and cyber vault technologies

are already horizontal capabilities across clouds. Even the focus on Zero Trust security is really all about making sure the security architecture of multicloud is a common horizontal service, not a collection of silos.

One other interesting area is the digital transformation of our telecom networks. We expect even broader adoption of virtualization, software defined architectures, open systems and open interfaces with early adoption of concepts like Open RAN. While Dell is directly working in telecom to make this happen, indirectly every enterprise’s digital transformation should benefit from increased openness and faster innovation in our communication systems.

In 2023, we expect accelerating innovation to focus on making the entire technology ecosystem work as a platform for your digital transformation. We also expect organizations to lean into technology that gives them flexibility and open access to innovation, and to partners who can coordinate the sprawl into an automated working system.

And there’s good reason – no single solution, platform or provider will deliver on the full promise of technology. That means that the proverbial “walled gardens” of “closed” ecosystems will crumble.

AI will reach an inflection point

We’ve been talking about the promise of AI for years. 2023 is a year that we expect acceleration of real-world use of AI and machine learning. We have the tools and software systems. We have accumulated significant data sets. We also have invested in training across almost every industry so our teams can graduate from experimentation to real world AI projects.

At Dell, we have been on this journey and today have around 1000 projects, products, or efforts focused on using AI to advance our business. We are seeing our customers following a similar path, and in 2023, we’ll begin to see more real impacts of AI/ML.

That means, we also need more infrastructure optimized for these highly demanding workloads. Advanced servers and storage to power AI are doing that work for customers today, but in 2023, there will be an even broader range of acceleration chips entering the market and a correlating increase in performance and efficiency.

We also need to make it simpler to share data between clouds so that training and inferencing activity can be distributed. In fact, it is estimated that by 2025, 88% of servers for AI workloads

deployed at the edge will be used for inferencing and the distribution of not just data, but also the AI/ML processing of that data is already underway.

Organizations that ride the second wave of AI will see a distinct competitive advantage as AI becomes able to better perceive, learn and reason – and give developers and data scientists more freedom to deliver applications and outcomes. Organizations can enhance productivity and efficiency, lower power requirements, and accelerate multicloud and edge strategies. As the industry matures, AI will also become more democratized as open-source AI becomes prevalent and accessible to larger communities.

Momentum will accelerate for Zero Trust architectures

The digital transformation of the global economy is significantly increasing the number of potential attack surfaces. The lack of a true perimeter puts organizations at greater risk to their data, their supply chain and anywhere along that continuum. Today, ransomware attacks are the #1 threat for most organizations, occurring every 11 seconds and costing $13 million per occurrence.

With so many of our customers globally transforming their security strategies, many are looking at Zero Trust architectures to better secure their environments. The three main tenets of Zero Trust aren’t that challenging: universal continuous authentication of everything; robust authoritative policy driven behavior; and deeply integrated threat management.

The real challenge is the current state of the industry and technology makes the design and integration of Zero Trust too complex for most customers. Our job is to ease that burden and simplify the process. This includes assessing an organization’s current state and delivering actionable insights to mature their cybersecurity programs and align to Zero Trust. Through the continued development of roadmaps, best practices and standardization, we can make adoption much quicker and easier. Ultimately, Zero Trust will become the foundation for a new level of data security and trust in a highly distributed multi-cloud world where everything is connected.

This shortlist is at the top of my mind for the next year, but if there’s one thing 2022 taught us, it’s how hard it is to predict the future. No doubt, 2023 will be full of unknowns and surprises. But as a tech optimist, I am confident that innovation will drive amazing progress. And I’m excited for what lies ahead.

BALAJI RAO

AREA VICE PRESIDENT, INDIA AND SAARC COMMVAULT

BY SANJAY @ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

Commvault (NASDAQ: CVLT), a recognised global enterprise leader in intelligent data services across on-premises, cloud, and software as a service (SaaS) environment, sponsored a research which was conducted by the leading market research firm, IDC on the challenges faced by Indian organizations arising out of the massive data sprawl and storing and securing the business data in the hybrid cloud era. The IDC Spotlight, commissioned by Commvault, on Modernizing Data Management in the Hybrid Cloud Era with SaaS Data Protection, Doc #APTS7838X, May 2022, which aimed at identifying the top priorities enterprises are looking at to thrive in the new normal, revealed that 71% (percent) of organizations cited data backup/data recovery as their number one priority for cloud investments for the next two years.

For today’s organizations, data is the most valuable asset, and its loss can result in irreversible damage to the business—loss of efficiency and productivity, profits/revenue, brand reputation, and customers. The research revealed that Cloud-based data recovery is among the key priorities for India enterprises as it helps them effectively deal with multiple issues of traditional backup and recovery solutions such as inability to scale up or down, lack of pay-as-you-go pricing model, or absence of data storage across multiple geographic locations, to name a few.

Ransomware emerged as the biggest challenge during the pandemic due to accelerated digital transformation. About 37% of organizations stated that their sensitive or secret data was exfiltrated while 53% of the respondents mentioned that ransom was paid, but 49% of organizations were still unable to access systems or data as it was blocked for a few days. The study also highlighted that 20% of organizations were forced to pay a ransom amount between US$25,001 to US$50,000.

COMMVAULT

DATA BACKUP AND RECOVERY AMONG THE TOP PRIORITIES FOR

Balaji Rao, Area Vice President, India and SAARC, Commvault, said, “India has been one of the worst victims of ransomware attacks in the past few years. It is imperative for business leaders to therefore invest in a right data partner who can support the organization with powerful and comprehensive multi-layered protection and provide advanced detection and rapid recovery from data breaches and security threats. The hybrid cloud era is here to stay and an advanced data management solution with SaaS data protection capabilities will be the key to a resilient future.”

With organizational data volume increasing at an exponential rate, the ability to quickly recover

important data is mission-critical for enterprises. The study cited that over 28% of enterprises will have multiple private and/or public cloud environments and migrate workloads and data between them by 2023. In addition, some enterprises are looking to shift their public cloud workloads to a hosted or non-cloud environment for better performance, security, availability, and control.

All of this means that organizations must focus on implementing effective data resilience strategies through a comprehensive backup and recovery strategy for hybrid and multi cloud environments.

“The hybrid cloud era is here to stay and an advanced data management solution with SaaS data protection capabilities will be the key to a resilient future.”

Commvault has recognised as global enterprise leader in intelligent data services across on-premises, cloud, and software as a service (SaaS) environment

INDIAN ORGANIZATIONS: COMMVAULT SURVEY